2010 September | Online Marketing News

Five Ways To Use Your Social Profiles For SEO - Whiteboard Friday »

Social media is becoming more and more important as the days go by; how else would I get my tri-weekly fix of XKCD delivered to me? Many people know about the marketing benefits from social media profiles, but sites like Facebook and Twitter can make a significant difference in your SEO campaign, too! This week, Rand shows us five great ideas for using these sites to help with your SEO strategy.

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Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about social media profiles. A lot of marketers, a lot of people in the SEO field know and realize that social media profiles can be valuable for their marketing efforts on the Web. But they don’t know exactly how to use them or where to use them. That’s what I am going to try to help you with today. So, what we have are five great ideas around how to leverage your social profiles to help with SEO and then some specific tactics and recommendations on each one that I think even some of the advanced folks will find pretty valuable.

So, let’s start here with direct links. You can see that, basically, I can take my profile on a LinkedIn, a Twitter, a Facebook, a MySpace, a Digg, a Reddit, a Hacker News. There are tons of these, hundreds of these. In fact, I’ll link you over. We’ve got sort of a list going on SEOmoz somewhere. You can take these, create profiles on here, and these profile pages oftentimes will have a followed link, sometimes will have a no followed link, but even that’s okay, and point that link over to your website. So, essentially, MySite.com is now getting some credit. And this pen is getting thrown in the trash. Oh, I missed. Sadly missed.

When you do this, you do a couple of things. Number one is, when they are followed links, obviously you are getting direct link credit. When they are no followed links, sometimes people are picking these up and scraping them and you get credit from elsewhere. Sometimes you are just seeing the fact that, oh, someone finds you on those places. You’ve commented somewhere. They’re checking out your profile. They can follow that link over to your website. So, having these profiles exist and having the links point back to the right kinds of places on your website is critically important, very valuable.

Number two, SERPs domination. Now, when you are doing SERPs domination, what you are essentially trying to achieve is to fill up the top results with results that are let’s say positive or at least that you control what goes into those results. Places like Twitter.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, and even places that are a little more random in the social media sphere, like a deviantART or a Drawer.com, those types of places will all help you to potentially fill up these results. There are a few critical things that you are going to need to do if you want to get these ranking well though. You can’t just create them. Tons and tons of people just create them. Lots of spammers just create them.

You need to fill up the profile with good information. You also need to participate relatively heavily in the site, at least initially. What you want to get going, if this is LinkedIn, you want to participate in LinkedIn Q&A. You want to actually import your email address book so that you form all of those connections. If this is Twitter, you want to start following people and topics. You want to start getting listed into the Twitter lists. You want to start having people following you and tweet at you. If this is Facebook, you’re going to need those same sorts of connections. Whatever the community is, you need to build up a robust profile with actual content. Fill out all the minimum requirements. Maybe even go overboard and start adding lots of content yourself to your profile. Also, you want to contribute heavily so that this gets indexed by the search engines. It becomes popular on the social site and it gets you into the SERPs.

It is also very valuable to link to these. This is one of my sort of pro expert tips. What I personally love to do is everywhere I speak, everywhere I am asked to give a talk, everywhere that features a quote from me or features my profile for a webinar or something like this, I always ask them to use the same biography. That bio quote includes, it will say, "Rand Fishkin is the CEO and cofounder of SEOmoz." That links to our website. And, "He wrote ‘The Art of SEO’." That will link to the O’Reilly site. Then, you know, "You can follow him on Twitter at RandFish," and that will link back to this Twitter profile site. Every time I give a speech, give a webinar, or participate in something offline, those links add up and help to make my profile rank better. It is a great, great way to go in terms of building links to those individual profiles. A really smart way to leverage offline and online marketing together.

Number three, so, brand awareness. On a lot of these sites when you are participating, when you are doing good things to get those direct links and doing good things for SERPs domination, you are also getting a lot of brand awareness. This is really important from the perspective of you don’t want to contribute to social media sites, particularly if you are a brand representative or a representative of your company or a representative of your personal brand in a way that would be contrary to how you would like your brand to be perceived. I know this is more sort of a marketing communication discussion, a little bit less SEO. But it is critical for SEO as well, because people who find a divergence between who you are on Twitter and Facebook versus who you are on your blog are going to be put off a little bit. There is that emotional disconnect that happens when you see that a brand or a person isn’t being authentic to itself. That is why it is critical to maintain those.

The other thing is you do want to make sure that you are leveraging these in smart ways. If you have a Facebook profile that you’re trying to build up, you are definitely going to want to link to it from your own website. I want this site over here pointing to Facebook and referencing it and making this sort of a conversion focused action that will drive people to participate. Remember that you can get network effects out of these. When you are updating your statuses, when you are providing information on these, you want these to be followed by people but you want to make sure that they are the kinds of things that people want to see, that they want to share. You can’t just be adding junk content.

It has to be updates not only that are sort of interesting and valuable, but updates that will make other people look good when they share them. We’ve talked about this principle a few times at SEOmoz. The idea in the social media world is even bigger. When you look at what gets re-tweeted, what gets re-shared on Facebook, what gets re-blogged on a platform like Tumblr, it’s the stuff that makes the person who is sharing it look good. Right? So, when I tweet out something about SEO, if it is just self- promotional, not a lot of folks are going to tweet that. But if I tweet out something that is interesting research about the field, a lot of other SEOs are going to tweet that because it is going to make them look good to their followers. That is what you are trying to achieve.

Number four, drive traffic and second order links. Right? So, with a lot of these social pages you have the opportunity when you produce content on them — when I tweet, when I do a Facebook status update, when I blog on Tumblr, when I contribute a LinkedIn status update, even when I contribute a post on a social news site like a Reddit or Hacker News or Digg or Delicious or something like that — to potentially promote a link. Those links will drive direct traffic, usually in proportion to the number of people that are following me.

But there are lots of other principles at work here, too. That’s I why I recommend you check out something like "The Science of ReTweets" by Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. It will tell you things like there are certain times of day that are more optimal. There are certain words that are more optimal and less optimal to use. There is certain phrasing and formatting. In particular, this is a pro tip for Twitter stuff. Make sure that you don’t start the tweet with the link. Start the tweet with some copy. And you actually want to make sure that you have some extra content at the end of it. Potentially, one of the things that we’ve seen is that having either a hyphen or a colon before the link, announcing it, is really good, and that having hash tags, if you put a hash tag here right after the link, it will sometimes make the link stand out less. So the optimal way to go is text introducing the link, link, some additional text, and then if you want a hash tag or a reference or a via or those kinds of things.

Remember that if you do a direct re-tweet, it won’t show as coming from you. So if you can make those tweets unique when you are sharing a URL, you are likely to get paid more attention as well. The great part about this is you don’t just drive traffic with these, you also drive these sort of second order effects. I’ll show you an example. My friend Kang here from up above has found this link. I’ve tweeted it out. Then he goes to MySite.com. He visits whatever page I’ve tweeted there. Then he thinks, "Oh, well, that’s actually pretty interesting." So, Kang’s blog now links directly to it. This is why it is so important to be building that type of content that is share worthy, which we talked about a second ago, and to be tweeting, sharing, linking to, and Facebook status updating and LinkedIn status updating with those types of things. They are the kinds of things that will drive those second order effect of links and that will help you do SEO in the long run.

All right, final one here. Number five is that social media profiles can be a source of content for your site, both direct and inspirational. This means that social profiles can help you build the content that you need to have on your site in order to perform well in the engines, in order to target the long tail in a lot of cases. I’ll show you what I am talking about. And even to do some exciting link based stuff.

One of the tactics that I really liked is a specific one, and I’ll talk about a couple, is to use YouTube. YouTube sometimes will have very popular videos. When they are reference videos, or they are longer videos, or they have sort of tougher to understand content or the kind of content were someone might actually want to parse it in text form, you can personally transcribe. Add some value, right? Break out the things that are important. Bold them. Highlight some quotes. That kind of thing. Build, essentially, your own version of that video. You can embed the video from YouTube on your site, have a commentary and transcript. Do an SEO friendly title. Now you’ve created great content using, leveraging someone else’s YouTube video. This kind of thing is just a phenomenal way to build content in a scalable way. You know that this is interesting stuff. You know this is stuff people care about because it has lots of views. It has become popular. Lots of people are tweeting it and sharing it. So you can follow up and capitalize on that.

You can do this as well with things like Twitter. If people are tweeting links or tweeting a conversation back and forth — you’ll see TechCrunch do this all the time, where they’ll take an interesting conversation or Media Gazer, those kinds of sites — they’ll take an interesting conversation back and forth and they’ll republish it with sort of screenshots of the tweets back and forth between people. They’ll do a little bit of analysis. That will become a blog post. A permanent piece of content that other people will reference and link to and comment on and add content to. That means you can potentially earn rankings and traffic for those in the engines as opposed to tweets, which dissolve. I really liked a quote that was tweeted today that was for Brett Tabke. He said that the instant a blog post is created that content starts living forever and producing SEO forever. The instant a tweet is created it starts dying. Right? It starts going away. It becomes temporal. It fades in the background.

You can also use this for more direct kinds of content generation. That is to say, particularly on sites like Twitter, which essentially are very temporal in nature. As we’ve discussed, you can take this content that you produce, I tweet a few times a day, some of them are very interesting links, some of them are interesting content, and I can reproduce them in sort of a daily digest on my site. A blog post if I’d like. An archiving system. That content is priceless, right? I’ve carefully crafted those 140 words, but what are they doing for my SEO? Nothing. That is why it is so valuable to potentially releverage the content that you are creating in a walled garden environment, like Facebook, something like LinkedIn, particularly something like Twitter that is temporal, into this format on your own site and have the opportunity to rank for it.

All right, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow SEOmoz on Twitter! You should also follow me, Aaron!

If you have any tips or advice that you’ve learned along the way, or have a question, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

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September 30, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

How to Turn Google Analytics Into Your Own Rank Tracker Using Custom Variables »

Posted by MikeCP

Today I want to talk about tracking organic ranking in Google Analytics. Previously, we were able to determine the page from which a Google organic click was coming from (detailed on the Distilled blog by Will Critchlow). This was nice because we could append this to the end of our keywords in Google Analytics for some interesting data (André Scholten’s post at Yoast.com has a step by step) as seen below.

Keyword Page Rankings
Image courtesy of Yoast.com

This solution provides limited utility, and if you’re like me, you implemented it, maybe checked it out once in a while, but never really turned this into actionable or otherwise meaningful data. I’m going to detail how rank tracking in Google Analytics can be made a lot more useful thanks to custom variables and a change in Google’s referring URLs. But first…

Some History

When Google began testing an AJAX search interface in early 2009 there was a flurry of concern that it could mean the end of traditional rank tracking, web analytics packages, and I’m sure someone said SEO was dead, too. The concern wasn’t without merit; Google was serving results in AJAX with the URL pattern as http://www.google.com/#q=keyword, and most analytics packages ignored the hash and everything after.

Fast forward to September 8th, when Google introduced Google Instant. The AJAX SERP usage had been steadily increasing over time, but shot up in usage when Instant was rolled out. Fortunately for Omniture, WebTrends, and other third party analytics packages, Google worked out a way to pass the referrer information from the SERPs, rank tracking still works, and I’m still working as an SEO in a living industry.

As it turns out, Google includes even more information in the AJAX SERPs than they previously did, including one really interesting parameter: "cd=". The cd= parameter contains the exact ranking position of the search listing, which makes for some really awesome possibilities, especially when paired with Google Analytics’ custom variables.

Why Custom Variables?

Custom variables are a bit of an enigma to even advanced Analytics users. I’ll admit that I never really made much use of them in the past. You’ll often see examples where custom variables are used to track logged in vs. unlogged in users, which is definitely a great use. Rob Ousbey’s 6 cool things YOU can do with custom variables is a good set of examples to get your feet wet.

In André Scholten’s example above we’re using Google Analytics user defined value, isn’t that just as good a custom variable? Well, the difference depends on how you intend on using your data. With custom variables, you’re granted much more flexibility within Google Analytics for slicing and dicing data. For instance, through the use of either custom reporting or advanced segments with custom variables, I can pretty easily track how much revenue a keyword has brought in when ranked in the 2nd position, as opposed to the 4th. While this may be possible with the user defined variable, it would require quite a bit of work after an excel data dump.

Now, let’s get to business:

The How

Getting this properly set up was remarkably easy for me, and I have so very little programming knowledge, so I would imagine most wouldn’t have much issue. I used PHP, as I was working with a WordPress site, but I’m sure you crazy hackers can do the same in most any language.

Update: See Joost and André Scholten’s comments below for a JavaScript method of passing the cd= value

Step One - Extract cd= Value from Referrer String

I used this snippet to do this.

<?php preg_match("/cd\=(\d+)/",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $matches);
$str = $matches[0];
preg_match("/(\d+)/",$str,$matches);
$rank = $matches[0] ?>

Please don’t make fun of my hacky coding

This assigns the cd= value to the $rank variable. We’ll reference this in…

Step 2 - Call cd= Value in our Google Analytics snippet

Now, we want to insert the custom variable call between the setAccount and trackPageview lines in our Analytics snippet (shown below using the asynchronous code):

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Ranking','$rank',2]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);"

We’ve set the custom variable slot to 1, and the scope to the session-level (the last argument, set as 2). If you are already making use of custom variables, be sure to not overwrite a previously occupied slot. For more information on how the custom variable is formatted, see Google’s help page on the topic.

Step 3 - Create an IF Statement so the CustomVar isn’t Called Every Time

We only want to include this line when we have a cd= value, otherwise every new click will overwrite the last value. To do this, I used the following IF statement, again coded in PHP. This is the final step, and the complete Google Analytics snippet:

<?php if ($rank != '' ) {
echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Ranking','$rank',2]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);";
echo "\n";
  }
else {
echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);";
    }
echo "\n";
?>

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

Here we’re checking if $rank has a value. If it does, we’ll include the custom variable call with that $rank value, if not, we’ll print the Google Analytics code as normal. Also included in the above are some line breaks (\n), so that the code formats correctly.

The Most Important Part - Analyzing Our Data

What’s the point of going through all this effort if it doesn’t provide you with any analytical insight? None, of course. But this rank tracking solution has some added benefits over the traditional rank tracking software that may be really useful to some SEOs. These include:

Rankings by City, Region, Country

Traditional rank tracking software suffers in that its ranking results are dependent on the location of the servers. With custom variable rank tracking and a little spreadsheet pivot table magic it’s pretty easy to get your site’s rank for any location.

Historical, Definite, Data

Once this is properly set up you’ve got access to definite rankings within your Analytics data from that point on. So as holiday season 2011 rolls around, its easy enough to review where your site ranked during the 2010 holidays, helping to set budgets, goals, and expectations.

Bounce Rate/eCommerce Data/etc. by Rank

Whatever your KPI, you can compare it against search ranking. Reporting the ROI of link building efforts or on site optimization becomes much easier when you’ve got rankings included in your dataset.

Some of the quick ideas I had around this include:

Average rank over time for top 50 keywords
Average rank over time for 4+ word keyphrases
Bounce rate for 2nd+ page clicks
Revenue % increase for Keyword X when ranking increases from 2 to 1

I should note that getting averages is a lot easier in Excel with a pivot table, as seen below:

Average rank pivot table
This can also be adjusted to show your minimum rank, as well

Creating Custom Reports and Advanced Segments

Custom variables aren’t included in the default reports for Google Analytics, so unless you do all your work in Excel, you’ll probably want to create some custom reports or advanced segmentation to work with the data directly in Analytics.

Advanced segmentation is great for this data. Below is the function one would use to track rankings between 11 and 15, which might be strong candidates for on-page optimization that could provide the boost onto the first page:

Advanced Segmentation
You can apply this particular advanced segment with this link.

The Downsides

The most obvious downside is that you’re only receiving a ranking when a listing is being clicked on, so for very small sites there may be limited utility. Ranking data will be spotty past the 2nd page, as well.

Additionally, the AJAX SERPs are not being served to all users in all locations. Small sample size warning here, but I’m seeing about 40% of organic Google traffic coming from the AJAX SERPs (done through a simple calculation of visits with our custom variable divided by total Google organic visits over the same time period). Michael Whitaker is seeing this number over 50% in his data. This number is likely going to increase as Instant is rolled out further.

The #-pack local listings can really throw things off, too. If a particular query gets one of these to start the SERP, the cd= continues after:

cd= rankings

Lastly, there does exist the possibility that Google discontinues its use of the cd= variable for whatever reason.

Go Analyze

I hope some of you can make some good use out of this functionality. I’ve only had it installed on my sites for a short time, but I’ve definitely found it interesting to play around with. If you don’t already have Excellent Analytics installed in your Excel I would highly recommend doing so, even if you don’t implement this tracking, and especially if you do.

I’d like to thank Michael Whitaker of Monitus for his help. He’s been installing this setup for his clients for a bit now. Monitus offers proper eCommerce Google Analytics installation for Yahoo! stores, which is surprisingly difficult without Monitus.

If you’ve got any other ideas for working with this data, sound off in the comments or let me know on Twitter @MikeCP. Personally, I’m really excited to have this data rolling in and the possibilities are nearly endless. I’ll be sure to report any interesting ways to manipulate the data in future blog posts. Cheers!

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September 29, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

How to Turn Google Analytics Into Your Own Rank Tracker using Custom Variables »

Posted by MikeCP

Keyword Page Rankings
Image courtesy of Yoast.com

Some History

Why Custom Variables?

Now, let’s get to business:

The How

Step One - Extract cd= Value from Referrer String

I used this snippet to do this.

<?php preg_match("/cd\=(\d+)/",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $matches);
$str = $matches[0];
preg_match("/(\d+)/",$str,$matches);
$rank = $matches[0] ?>

Please don’t make fun of my hacky coding

This assigns the cd= value to the $rank variable. We’ll reference this in…

Step 2 - Call cd= Value in our Google Analytics snippet

Now, we want to insert the custom variable call between the setAccount and trackPageview lines in our Analytics snippet (shown below using the asynchronous code):

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Rank','$rank',2]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);"

Step 3 - Create an IF Statement so the CustomVar isn’t Called Every Time

<?php if ($rank != '' ) {
echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Rank','$rank',2]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);";
echo "\n";
  }
else {
echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);";
    }
echo "\n";
?>

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

The Most Important Part - Analyzing Our Data

Rankings by City, Region, Country

Historical, Definite, Data

Bounce Rate/eCommerce Data/etc. by Rank

Some of the quick ideas I had around this include:

Average rank over time for top 50 keywords
Average rank over time for 4+ word keyphrases
Bounce rate for 2nd+ page clicks
Revenue % increase for Keyword X when ranking increases from 2 to 1

I should note that getting averages is a lot easier in Excel with a pivot table, as seen below:

Average rank pivot table
This can also be adjusted to show your minimum rank, as well

Creating Custom Reports and Advanced Segments

Advanced Segmentation
You can apply this particular advanced segment with this link.

The Downsides

The #-pack local listings can really throw things off, too. If a particular query gets one of these to start the SERP, the cd= continues after:

cd= rankings

Lastly, there does exist the possibility that Google discontinues its use of the cd= variable for whatever reason.

Go Analyze

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September 29, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 2: Analysis Redefined »

Posted by JoannaLord

Well here we go, you ready to jump into analytics, part deux? Just a heads, up this is the second post of a three post series. The first post, "So You Call Yourself an Analyst, Part 1: Asking the Right Questions, walked through ways in which you could reevaluate the questions steering your analytical efforts.

The ~~tough love~~ truth is that most marketers are not analyzing the right data. We have so many tools to help us "analyze," that most of us are sitting in front of our dual monitor set-ups, staring at reports, excel grids, and pivot tables wondering what the hell we are supposed to be seeing. This is analysis paralysis, and I am here to help talk you back to a place of insight and action.

#1 Anomolies take precedence

I get asked a lot, "where should I start?" Simply put — start with the data that looks strange. The majority of your time should be spent on things that surprise you, things that concern you, and things that shift the momentum of your website’s performance.

For example, last week at SEOmoz, I was pulling our weekly stats and saw this:

I saw that our Rank Tracker tool traffic fell of a cliff. #awesome. You can bet this was prioritized, and we spent the next hour poking around the data before realizing the tracking code had been implemented wrong during a site update. {facepalm} So how do you research these anomalies?

Analytics Intelligence is one of the more obvious places to start if you are using GA. It is under the "Intelligence" tab and allows you to set alerts for when your data goes "off pattern." It notifies you when numbers fall below or peak above user-set parameters. These notifications are controlled by a sensitivity gauge that you control, and when an alert is triggered you are notified by email.

The "Compare to" feature is another great way to see issues quickly. In GA you can compare two date ranges and see how they measure up, which is a great way to see discrepancies in otherwise stable datasets. You can compare the vital stats of any section of your site from one date range to another. I use this all the time.

Compare to GA feature

(Example of "Compare to" feature, making drops in data, week over week, obvious)

There are a number of other ways to isolate out changes in your site’s data, most of them involving things like manual benchmarking or daily monitoring. I know not everyone uses GA, but the two features above are a great way to see anomalies as they are happening, not after the fact.

#2 Align your analysis with your company’s current goal(s)

Next up, you should turn your attention to stats that directly match up or feed into your company’s goals. It should be noted that some analysts would prioritize this data to the top of your list, but I personally think that stable data is just that…stable. For that reason, I think only after you have problem data isolated out and understood should you turn your attention to "other data."

When I say "other data" I mean– the data that will let your company know if its hitting its goals. It is up to you to know the roadmap for your company and isolate out data insights that help keep you on track. Once or twice a month I go in and "explore" but analysis, for the most part, should not be exploratory. So what are some specific features that can help you analyze key data?

Advanced segmentation is one of my favorite GA features. It enables you to quickly cross reference different metrics, dimensions, user types, and variables. You can save segments and apply them across multiple profiles, so if you have a key metric the whole company is watching and working on, they can easily log in and check progress with a saved segment. Here is a video on advanced segmentation if you are looking to get started.

Visualization of metrics is too often overlooked in my opinion. There is a number of visualization options in GA that allow you to see the data differently. I am a firm believer in viewing the same data set in a variety of ways, because in my experience it forces your brain to revisit relationships, trends, etc.

Visualization in Google Analytics

(Visualization options in GA, I particularly love bar graphs for gauging relationships)

Lastly, I do want to mention the weighted sort feature in GA, since it is so new, and a lot of people probably still aren’t using it. After months of asking for it, GA gave us the ability to take a metric in list view and "freeze" it so we can apply a second filter. If you don’t have GA, Dr. Pete shows us how to create your own here. This helps us analyze only data with the greatest impact.

#3 Not all data is good data, know when to move on

This is a tough one for a lot of analysts. It can be a "data-head high" to get into the numbers and spend hours trying to prove a hunch, but it is important you know when to walk away. Yup, that’s right…I am telling you to give up, throw in the towel, wave the analytical white flag. You can’t change the numbers. You just can’t. Sometimes the analytic Gods will win, and sometimes you will, let it be and move on.

What are you left with?

The data that matters. The hardest part about analytic packages like GA, Omniture, and others is that there literally is an unlimited supply of data. By using company goals to prioritize your analysis and using all of the features at your disposal, you begin to see that pile of data take shape.

Repeat after me friends: "I will only spend time on data that will return the love."

Next week I will finish up the series with the third post focused on applying value to this key data and using those values to help decide on action steps. I will also wrap up the series with some examples of how an analyst can better present all of this data to those that need to see it. I will try to keep it shorter than this week’s post, but no pinky swears on that one.

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September 28, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

The Danger of Overdoing SEO »

Posted by randfish

During my first few years in the SEO field, half of the sites I’d visit - those my SEO brethren in the forums or over email owned - were what today we’d probably call "over-optimized." They tended to have features like:

Keyword after keyword stuffed into the title element of every page
Overly-lengthy and keyword rich URL strings
Page filled with "SEO’d" content that was never intended to be a focus for visitors
Backlink profiles that lacked a single high-quality, "editorial" link

At its best, our profession is about making amazing things that people are asking to see (via their search queries in the engines) and then marketing it in the most optimal ways. At its worst (excluding the crap-hat junk that doesn’t even deserve to be called "SEO"), it looks like this:

Keyword Stuffed Page

There’s a gigantic gap between this type of "SEO" and the industry’s best practices, but the individual recommendations and changes are so subtle that it’s not surprising many practitioners go a bit overboard. After all, the process of starting SEO often looks like:

Week 1: Notice in your analytics that search sends awesome traffic and start optimizing some meta tags (since you heard that’s what SEO is about) by putting more keywords in them
Week 2: See that those changes have had no effect, so begin doing some light reading on the topic
Week 3: After you’ve glossed over a few SEO resources (perhaps not necessarily the best ones), start "optimizing" pages by filling the tags you’ve heard were important with your keywords, changing your internal links to be keyword-rich, placing more keywords on your pages in every conceivable tag and location, maybe even optimizing for some wholly bunk metric like the average keyword density of the top 10 ranking pages
Week 4: Possibly see a bump in some rankings and, tragically, inheriting confirmation bias, convincing yourself that the strategy has worked and that it needs to be repeated.
Week 5-20: Struggle with and eventually give up on SEO, or skate by on the fringes with equally poor quality linking practices that get many/most of your pages penalized but maintain rankings on a few

This pattern (or some similar variation) has played itself out in 9/10 stories I hear about folks who’ve jumped into the waters of SEO haphazardly - and honestly, it’s hard to blame them. The engines provide just enough information to keep webmasters curious but unsatisfied. Many of the sites and pages that rank well do actually employ pretty spammy SEO tactics, making it hard for those trying to learn SEO by reversing their competition’s success (temporary though it may be).

This doesn’t just apply in the on-page world.

If you haven’t yet read it, this thread from Reddit - My Job Was to Game Digg - and this one on Hacker News about it, are excellent examples of the perception problem that social media pushes for SEO have caused. This comment, in particular, stood out to me:

Comment about Mint.com on Reddit

As you can see, the web’s social voters and contributors have a passing tolerance for the "right" kinds of optimization, but a zealous abhorrence for those that violate their sense of propriety. Even if Google doesn’t worry about "off-topic" linkbait, linkbaiters themselves should have cause for concern.

The engines aren’t going to take it.

More and more, though, the engines are fighting back against this through changes like the Vince update (and subsequent focusing on brands as a way to sort out the web’s "cesspool"). We’ve also recently seen a dramatic increase in the aggressiveness with which Google will change your titles, descriptions and negatively alter the rankings/visibility of sites that step over this line.

In the long run, it’s hard to imagine Google allowing poor results to flourish - especially those who garnered rankings through manipulation. Those sites and pages that follow every single optimization tactic, from internal links to massive keyword focus to "perfect" anchor text in their off-site link building are going to stand out like sore thumbs to the engines. Sites that build pages designed to attract links with little to no relation to the host site will struggle against the biases in the social media world.

And sites/pages that abuse these practices (both on and off-page) are going to have a terrifically hard time earning "natural" links. The organic sectors of the web tend not to link out to those types of sites/pages if they can help it.

It might sound ironic, but there’s an art to under-"optimizing" in order to achieve true "optimization."

p.s. Some folks noted they were hoping for a link to some good "best practices for on-page optimization" - here you go!

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September 27, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Replace Yahoo Linkdomain with Google Custom Search Engine »

Posted by Justin Briggs

Hey everyone! My name is Justin Briggs, and I’m an SEO consultant at Distilled. A few weeks ago, I packed up and moved across the country to come to Seattle. Some of you might know me better as "seozombie" on Twitter. This is my first post on SEOmoz, but you can expect to see more from me here and on our blog at Distilled.

With the transition of Yahoo! to Microsoft’s Bing backend, webmasters have lost the ability to perform advanced searches using the link: and linkdomain: parameters. Rand Fishkin wrote a post about replacing the Yahoo! linkdomain: data with other data sources. Although Linkscape and Open Site Explorer provide a great data source, there is some functionality that Yahoo! had that isn’t present in other tools yet. The primary functionality I missed was the ability to perform searches against page content; not just page title, URL, and anchor text.

These link searches can help you identify link opportunities from other websites’ (such as competitors) backlinks.

Searching Content of Backlinks

To solve this problem, I setup a Google Custom Search Engine using data from Open Site Explorer. There are two exports of data you can use, which are links and linking domains. I’ll briefly go over the pros and cons of each as a data source in GCSE.

Linking URLs

Pros

Only search content that has links
Less noise

Cons

Limited to top links
Limited to 25 URLs per domain
Multiple links per domain reduces domain diversity
Limited content (5,000 annotations = 5,000 URLS)

Linking Domains

Pros

Search all indexed content on a linking domain
Find linking sources not included in OSE export
Greater domain diversity
More content (5,000 annotations = 5,000 domains of content)

Cons

More noise
Large linking domains like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have subdomains (lots of noise)
Results that don’t have link

Setup of Custom Search Engine

Setup of your custom search engine is very easy. For this example, I’m going to use linking domains from OSE.

1) Perform search in Open Site Explorer

2) Pull linking domains for all pages on the root domain, export to CSV

Link Domains in OSE

3) Get list from Excel

Domains in Excel

I used Find & Replace to add a * to the end of all URLs, for matching. You can sort by DA or linking domains. Google Custom Search Engine only allows 5,000 annotations, so only copy up to 5,000 domains.

4) Create Custom Search Engine

Go to Google Custom Search Engine.

5) Perform your searches

So here are the pages on domains that link to distilled.co.uk, that include “link building” in the content and “resources” in the title.

Replace Yahoo linkdomain with GCSE

This solution gives you a new way to mine for backlinks opportunities using your competitor’s backlinks. You can also include linking domains from multiple competitors at the same time. However, you can only include up to 5,000 annotations at a time, so you might want to use some Excel filters to remove noise and duplicate entries.

Tips

Here are a few quick tips to speed things up.

Remove massive domains – Large domains like wordpress.com and blogspot.com can produce a lot of noise.
Use the –site: search to reduce noise – If a particular domain is creating a lot of noise in your search, use a negative site search to remove it.
Search brand mentions – A search for the brand can help find the linking pages on these domains.
Search top anchors from OSE – Find the pages that include the anchors the site is targeting.

Example Queries

"powered by wordpress" "distilled"

Find pages that mention the brand “Distilled” and include “Powered by Wordpress”. This is an easy way to find the blogs linking to Distilled.

“guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column” -site:blogspot.com -site:wordpress.com -wordpress.org

Find guest blogging opportunities, but filter out domains that may create a significant amount of noise.

"powered by vbulletin" AND seo

Find vBulletin powered forums mentioning SEO.

“link building” intitle:resources

Find link building resource pages.

Give it a Try & Search SEOmoz’s Backlinks

A few queries to try:
"top seo tools"
“link building” intitle:resources
"open site explorer" "powered by wordpress"
allinurl:seomoz

Go ahead, try it, you know you want to!

google.load(’search’, ‘1′, {language : ‘en’});
google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
var customSearchControl = new google.search.CustomSearchControl(’003900435525526377884:slc3halv8iq’);
customSearchControl.setResultSetSize(google.search.Search.FILTERED_CSE_RESULTSET);
customSearchControl.draw(’cse’);
}, true);

I removed linking domains with a DA greater than 90, just to remove some noise from larger domains. (Selecting this value to filter by was completely arbitrary and is just to make the example easier to use.)

Need More Queries?

Long List of Link Searches (SEOmoz)

21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries

74 B2B Link Building Queries

106 Sponsorship-Based Link Building Queries

I hope this helps everyone replace some of the functionality of the Yahoo! linkdomain command. If you’ve got more link searches or ideas to add, please share.

Technorati Tags

linkdomain, yahoo, link building, link queries, link searches

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September 26, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Video SEO Basics - Whiteboard Friday »

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Video SEO isn’t something we always think about when optimizing, but we really should. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover reviews some of the video SEO basics that every SEO should know about. After all, it’s a largely untapped market, unlike the Canadian maple tree market. Which is very tapped. (The Canadian maple tree video market, however, is quite untapped, but based on my scientific and extremely boring research in YouTube, I don’t recommend you pursue that market at all).

Anyways, we have a very special visitor this week, what with all of Danny’s meta discussions this month. Great Scott! That’s what happens when you get all meta and self-referential on us, Danny.

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Video Transcription

Hello, everybody. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO. For today’s Whiteboard Friday we’re going to be talking about video SEO. Now, last week I mentioned that was the most meta video we’d ever done. It was optimizing SEO resources, right? Now, this one is a video on video SEO. So this one, this one is the new champion of the most meta video that we have ever done here, and possibly the most meta video that you have ever seen. If there is some kind of disruption in the space-time continuum, totally my fault. I apologize.

–1.21 Gigawatts!?!–

That was unexpected. That was Doc from Back to the Future. A poor impression of it. Totally derailing my Whiteboard Friday. You’re killing me.

All right. Now, video SEO, huge opportunity here. This is more of a serious thing. Video SEO has low competition. You see in the universal results that video thumbnails show up about a third of the way from the top, right. You’re seeing little thumbnails. A lot of times it’s YouTube, but you also see Vimeo and lots of other video providers showing up. You are seeing those in lots and lots of SERPs, and increasing so actually. There is a huge demand from people because, you know, Google is doing A/B testing or multivariate testing. They’re seeing people are clicking on those. But, at the same time, you’ll have low competition. You’ll see a lot of times for very high competition keywords that have video results that the video results will just be kind of mediocre. They just kind of showed up there. Part of that is because it is new. Not a lot of people are optimizing for video, which is becoming extremely important. So, a lot of opportunity there.

The other part of this, I guess I can only talk for the United States, where I live, but the way that people are starting to consume media is changing drastically. We’ve all seen YouTube. We’ve all seen Vimeo. Now the devices people are using and the places they are watching video are different. You have things like the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPayWayTooMuchForGadgets and I am an Apple fanboy, kind of thing. You’re seeing these all over the place. There is the Android model, the operating system that is running lots and lots of things. system. You’re seeing the way that people are consuming media very differently. The market is growing. Based on that, the demand is high but the competition is really low. Lots of opportunity. This smells like money to me. This is huge. This is a big deal.

How do you take advantage of this? Well, there are different metrics the search engines use to look at video content. When the search engines crawl normal content, they can get some kind of idea of what text is trying to say by using their natural language processing algorithms. They can get some idea of what this text says just simply because they put so much time and so much energy into developing these algorithms to get some kind of semantic feeling for what text means. Now, this doesn’t translate directly into video because, part of the reason at least, is video is much bigger files. It takes a lot more processing to get an understanding of it. It is a lot more zeros and ones. With these Google and the search engines have provided Meta information that you can do about a video.

The two most important ones here are the title of the video — what do you title your video. That’s probably what people are going to search for, right. If it is the shoes video on YouTube or whatever it may be on YouTube. Those are a lot of times what people are searching for. That information turns out to be very important for video SEO.

Likewise, the description is also very important because it gives you more than whatever may be the character limit, probably around 140, I would guess for the title. But it gives you more text to describe it in more depth. This helps the search engines understand the video without having to go through all the intensive video processing.

Now, as video SEO is maturing, we’re starting to see more and more metrics start to affect the algorithm. So, let me be totally straightforward with this. This is just my speculation. I have not done tests on these ones. But they seem very likely to be impacting the video search results. My guess would be that they’ll be more impactful going forward. So, they are something to start paying attention to now.

The first one I see here is engagement stats. The most obvious one here is views. How many times is a video viewed? I know that when I go to YouTube and I search for something, after I look at the text, the title and the description, I then look at the views. Has this been watched 30 times or has it been watched 10 million times? It seems very, very likely to me that click-through rates are going to correlate with high view rates also. So, I think views are becoming increasingly important and are something that you should keep an eye on.

Number two is ratings. So, on YouTube they offer a five-point scale. On things like Vimeo and other things, they use a thumb up and a thumb down. That’s more similar to the Reddit system. These are actual humans who are giving their opinions and their expertise on video content. This is very helpful because search engines are designed to provide results for humans. Any imput you can get from humans is helpful for getting output for humans. This is something that Google figured out very early and is something that is very important.

Number three, comments. What could be more human than commenting on videos? In YouTube’s case, it is some of the lowest thresholds of intelligence we’ve ever seen on the Internet, which is really saying something. You have floor chant, below that you have YouTube comments. It is kind of rough, right. But this is a metric of actual human beings engaging with content and with the author or producer of the video. This seems like a very important metric to me. I don’t think it is the content of the comments, because they are awful. But I think it is the volume of it and the kind of themes that people are talking about. Are they saying, "this is awesome" or "this sucks?" I think that does have some kind of impact on it.

The last one is social metrics. Really, I think this is universal. It is not just the video vertical; I think it is the other verticals as well. By social metrics, I mean things like the amount of tweets or what people are saying in tweets, Delicious popular saves, or submissions to Reddit or Digg or any of those other things. How are people talking about this with their friends? So, you have things like the QDF algorithm, which is Google’s Query Deserves Freshness algorithm. What this does is it will artificially inflate the ability for something to rank based on temporal metrics. So, if lots and lots of people are linking to something or tweeting about it, then it can artificially rank higher than things that normally wouldn’t just because it is very important. You see this a lot of times with natural disasters. Things will just rise to the top when normally they wouldn’t. Michael Jackson stuff. We saw lots and lots of QDF stuff really blowing, making things rank when normally there was no way they would. This is something to keep in mind also. These social metrics.

Now, duration. I think is the last one. This one is more about the extremes, finding the outlier. If a video is three seconds long, it is probably not something that Google, Bing, or Yahoo will want to rank highly. At the same time, if it is something that is multiple hours long, they might want to rank it, but it is probably not what people are going to look for when they are doing video. One of the things about video and content on the Internet in general is that people want to consume it quickly. They like bulleted lists. They like quick pictures, inforgraphic types of things, and they like short videos. I should probably take my own advice and get to the end here. So, I’ll try to do that.

The last one we have for you is tactics. I have expressed that there is a huge opportunity here. I have talked about some of the metrics that are important. Now, tactics, the search engines have given you several tools on how to do this. Video sitemaps is, not new, because video sitemaps have existed for a while, but the protocol was recently revamped by the major search engines and the people who are involved with that protocol. They’ve added a couple of things that are interested. They’ve added the location of the thumbnail of the video. They’ve added things like if it is family friendly or not. They’ve added the URL of where the video is embedded. So, from an SEO perspective, this is really interesting. We don’t want links going to YouTube anymore because YouTube has plenty of links. Instead, with the new video sitemap, you can provide the URL of where it is embedded and then when the search engines index that content they’ll link back to you. So, it’s not so much that you get a link from it per se, but you get the click-through. So, someone clicking on the SERP, clicking that thumbnail, is going to go to your blog, where you embedded the video, rather than to the hosting provider. This is a big win for us SEOs and for us content producers.

The other one is transcriptions. So, what could be easier than just going back and using the old tactics you already have for creating content? With transcriptions, you take video, you take the audio from the video, and you turn it into plain text. This is something that the search engines can then use and interpret just like they do a normal web page. This is important for search engines, but it is also important for human beings as well. People with hearing impairments who can’t hear this video right now can then go through and read it. They can understand it that way. International people who are speaking different languages can then go through the content and read at their own pace. They can do whatever tools they need to translate it. It helps spread it more. It is both good for humans and for users, which is a win-win and that’s always the situation I try to get when I do SEO.

I recommend that you always try to go for those win-wins, because ultimately what the search engines are doing is chasing after the idea of getting the best information to human beings. I think that’s what it really comes down to, crafting your content for human beings. It is harder to do with video SEO, but it is becoming more and more possible to do it.

I appreciate your time today. I will see you next week.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow Danny on Twitter! Even more to your benefit, follow SEOmoz! Alternatively, you can always follow me, Aaron.

If you have any tips or advice that you’ve learned along the way, or if you came back from the future, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

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September 23, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 1: Asking the Right Questions »

Posted by JoannaLord

Today I am going to talk about something that plagues companies and consultants everywhere–half baked analysis. It’s something we’ve all done at some point, and something a lot of us still do on a regular basis. It’s unfortunate because as online marketers we all understand the power of good data mining, but time and time again we revert to generic inquiry, at best, and default report templates.

Disclaimer: Origionally I attempted to write about the five steps I follow for solid data analysis in one post, but as I approached my 6th page of content, I realized it may be best to break up into a series.

Alas, this will be the first of three posts, tackling a five-step process toward good data analysis. The three topics are:

Asking the Right Questions
Identifying What is Going Wrong
Turning Data Into Action

Yup that’s right…cancel that afternoon meeting because you my friend are going to be stoked about data analysis in 3…2..1…

Rethinking the Questions

A few weeks ago at our SEOmoz PRO Seminar I spoke on "Analyzing What Matters & Ignoring the Rest" and I challenged the attendees to rethink the questions that guide their data research. Too often we get caught up in asking questions that simply put– don’t really matter. Let me explain. It will always be important to know things like "How much has traffic increased" and "What referrers are performing better this month," but this sort of inquiry does not qualify as marketing analysis.

Sure it’s valuable to report that to your clients or boss, but as an analyst you are tasked with much more. You are tasked with finding things others can’t. You are expected to dive into the data head first and find issues before they become huge problems. You are also responsible for finding opportunities a.k.a. the "game changer" for your company…that is your job. If you don’t like the way that sounds, please stop calling yourself an analyst. You are stressing me out.

So what questions should you be asking? Bigger ones to start.

I know they sound uber-top level, but don’t roll your eyes just yet. I challenge each of you to write these out and really think about the answers. I think you’ll be surprised with what you come (or can’t come) up with. I’m going to apply this to SEOmoz as an example.

An outsider would look at our site and say we are -

Trying to sell PRO memberships
An increase or decrease in completed goals would show us if we are being successful
Losing traffic to our sign-up page, and a lower traffic count would be detrimental to our success

Well that is great, but honestly SEOmoz can’t succeed solely on increasing PRO memberships. The truth is, there is a lot more to it than that. We have a recognized brand with expectations on it, and a community of over 200,000 people that come to us for the latest SEO information on the web. We can’t afford to lose ground on either of those two. These are defining qualities of SEOmoz, and strong advantages over our competitors. So my three questions would leave me more complex answers, something like this:

Increase organic traffic on "Learn SEO" type queries, increase branded term searches, increase YOUmoz member engagement, and increase signups
More referrals from links to our resources, more traffic from people researching SEO, more YOUmoz submissions, more comments, improved engagement metrics on site, higher sign up attempts, higher signup completions, etc.
Decline in branded term searches, decline in organic traffic to resource pages, decline in time on site for YOUmoz members, etc.

So now what? You are left with a handful of metrics to investigate. Those metrics should be the base of your analysis efforts. I urge all of you to revisit the reasons why you analyze what you analyze, you’ll be surprised to learn that you don’t really have a good reason most of the time. After you have your new questions nailed down and you know what metrics you want to analyze, it’s time to jump in the data.

Start Macro and Go Micro

This is when I highly suggest you fill your coffee cup, or grab another Red Bull. I also support locking your office door, or putting up a "Do Not Disturb, I am Data Mining You Silly Non-Analyst" sign up on your cubicle. Okay anyway…so the main roadmap to solid analysis includes five steps and they are:

*Please note that Analyze, Value, and Action will be covered in upcoming posts in this series.

What Do We Mean by Macro Analysis?

Macro analysis means you have a solid understanding of the different sections of your site, the different user types that navigate it, and the top-level metrics. You should know these like the back of your hand. In addition to knowing these actual numbers you should know their rate of change (how often does that data point change), the depth of change (how extreme are those changes–big jumps? small steps?), and the way they interact (is there a consistent relationship between two metrics–one goes up/down, the other will too). If this sounds like a lot to continuously track, you are right. Good analysis is a lot of work. Thankfully SEOmoz pays me in cupcakes, and Champagne Wednesdays, I highly suggest negotiating for these perks ;)

At SEOmoz we track our top sections by week, so we can easily identify shifts in the data, and it looks something like this:

(A portion of our weekly analysis for full site stats)

You can see we aren’t just looking at our homepage, we are looking at our subdomains, our highest trafficked sections. We also are going beyond visitors, we are pulling top-level stats like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rates, etc. This graph goes around to the entire company once a week. This macro level view helps all of us understand the momentum of our site’s growth. It helps us easily isolate problem areas so we can address them before they grow into huge "Oh sh*t" moments. Trust me when I say, if you aren’t tracking your data at this macro level, you should start today.

What Do We Mean by Micro Analysis?
This part of the puzzle is the one that most people skip over. Micro analysis means you don’t just have a sense how your blog’s traffic is doing you know how many comments you get on it, how long they spend on it, how deep they go into your site after reading a post, and how many of your blog visitors end up converting for you. In short, micro analysis means you look at all those secondary data points that you can actually manipulate.

While it’s great to go into work on a Monday and say I want to increase traffic to my blog by 20%, it is a big feat to accomplish. Not only will it take a lot of time conceptualizing, writing and sharing that content, it will also, most likely, be less lucrative than if you took the existing traffic and increased its conversion rate by 5%. That sort of move is done by honing in on data at a micro analysis level.

Specifically this is where things like event tracking in Google Analytics and deeper dives into your preferred analytics package come in handy. Everyone has their own approach for micro analysis, but I think a good place to start is see where successful events (downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups, conversions, etc.) are taking place and see if you can come up with common demoninators. If you see that successful pages all have one or more thing in common, you can start testing these on other sections to increase conversions across your whole site. Here is an example of what we pull for SEOmoz:

(A portion of our micro tool usage analysis report)

We can see which tools are performing the best, and analyze those pages to see if we can isolate out page tweaks to roll out across all tool pages. It seems simple, but way too often analysts look into analytics to see how they are doing, and fail to put in the time required to uncover what they could be doing for increased success. You should know, for every single section and user type on your site, what makes it "successful." You need to be tracking these "successes" as closely as you would your visitor count.

Well this post got a little long, but I really wanted to give you guys some real examples on how I approach data analysis both at the macro and micro level. Hopefully, you can take some of this and apply it right away. I know we all have our own unique approach to analysis, and I’d love to hear yours in the comments below!

Next post I will be talking about the "analyze" step of a solid analysis strategy. That post will hone in on quick ways to figure out what is going wrong. I will talk about some GA features that you can use to make your analysis more effective and less time consuming. So stay tuned!

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September 22, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update »

Posted by randfish

Ugh… Part of me just wants to link to this old blog post and leave it at that.

But, since there’s actually a bit of data to share helping to show that (at least so far) Google Instant changes less than your average algorithmic rankings update, let’s share.

880,000 Search Visits Analyzed

Conductor released some nice research from anonymized data of sites on their software platform making a compelling case:

If Conductor keeps putting out this kind of stuff, they’ll be a "must-read" in no time

Hmm… Looks pretty darn similar to me. A tiny increase in 4, 5 and 6 word phrases would seem to go against many of the prognostications and fears that this move would decimate the long tail (though, to be fair, plenty of savvier search folks predicted a slight increase as Google’s "Suggest" function would be more obvious/visible to searchers and push them to perform more specific queries).

Data from 10,000 More Searches

Matt Bennett at MEC blogged some data from 5 sites in his purvue representing about 10,000 searches. He shared this excellent graph (similar to the one above):

That’s more evidence to suggest this is a very subtle change (if there’s any at all) in keyword demand.

Google Search Traffic for SEOmoz & Open Site Explorer

While I don’t have as much data to share as Conductor, I can show you some tidbits from SEOmoz.

Here’s SEOmoz.org’s traffic from Google in the past week compared to the week prior:

SEOmoz.org's Traffic Pre-and-Post Google Instant

And here’s a similar look at OpenSiteExplorer’s Google traffic:

OpenSiteExplorer Traffic Pre-and-Post Google Instant

There’s a suspiciously small amount of change in the keyword demand, and although these are certainly un-representative of the broader web, we can be relatively confident that lots and lots of folks in our industry, performing queries that might lead them to these two sites, have awareness of and are using Google Instant.

One change that did catch my eye (thanks to some Tweets on the topic) is that Google’s Suggest itself seems to have changed a bit:

Querying for SEOmoz in Google Instant

Hard to complain about that :-)

How to Convince your Boss that CRO is a Win »

Posted by Jamie

Today I’ll talk about one of my favorite topics, Conversion Rate Optimization (or CRO). I won’t be speaking about tools, case studies, or tips on what layouts or buttons colors work best; Dr. Pete, Paras Chopra and Oli Gardner have written some excellent blog posts on these topics recently. Instead, over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting a few lessons I’ve learned from doing CRO successfully (and unsuccessfully) for a variety of organizations. These are things I wish I had known when I got started.

Today’s post will focus on how to convince your organization to do CRO.

Make the Case for CRO using Simple Math

CRO may be popular on online marketing blogs, but I’m always surprised to learn that most organizations aren’t doing it. At the recent SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar in Seattle, conversion rate guru Tim Ash asked the audience how many of their companies were doing CRO. Of the 300 or so in the audience, only a few dozen individuals raised their hands. Of all the things I’ve worked on in online marketing, nothing has delivered a higher ROI than conversion rate optimization. And yet, it remains less popular than it should.

One explanation I’ve heard is that it’s difficult to get started. But with free tools like Google Website Optimizer, and affordable, yet capable services like Unbounce and Visual Website Optimizer, this excuse is quickly losing ground. The best explanation I can venture is that CRO doesn’t happen because it’s difficult to prioritize against the stack of urgent projects that marketing teams tackle each day.

Your first job should be explaining the potential return-on-investment of a CRO project. If your marketing team, boss or client knew the estimated ROI of CRO using metrics from their own business, they’ll be more likely to prioritize it ahead of other projects. So what’s the best way to make the case for CRO?

Use simple math. Take the numbers of conversions/goal completions from key process of your website, and show what would happen if they performed better. Imagine saying this to your boss or client:

The above example was generated using a simple Excel spreadsheet I created. Download the worksheet and just fill in the white cells with blue text (further instructions are later in this blog post). The spreadsheet will calculate a simple ROI and provide an easy, yet surefire argument.

The boxed quote above reflects the outcome of a retail web site example that has 632 sales a month with an average transaction size of $40. See the details in the screenshot of the spreadsheet below:

What to enter into the spreadsheet:

Experience Name
A friendly name for the User Experience you are considering optimizing using Conversion Rate Optimization. For this example we are using the Checkout Page of an typical retail e-commerce website.

Monthly Visits
I’d recommend the number of total Visits (for an average month) to the first page of the user experience you’d like to optimize using CRO. In this example above, this is how many Visits occurred on the checkout page of a given month. I believe Visits are better than Unique Visitors as they take count someone who visits twice during the same day as two distinct visits. I wouldn’t recommend using Page Views in this cell, since page reloads and other behaviors can make this number larger than it should be.

Monthly Conversions
The monthly conversions or successful completions to this user experience. In this example, the number of times a purchase was made from the Checkout page. For simple websites that have a single purchase experience, this is usually an easy number to determine. If not, make a best guess.

Average Cash Per Conversion
This is how much money you make on average for each conversion that is completed. An optional, but desirable field. A monetary estimate makes for a more compelling argument. For the example above, the company makes an average of $40 for each transaction. If you are a subscription business, this is where you would enter your customer lifetime value.

If you don’t have easy access to monetary values like average purchase size or customer lifetime value, just use the raw number of conversions to make your case. Using the data entered above, that would be the following (note that the Excel worksheet provides both):

Conversion Rate Increase
The estimated improvement that might be achieved using Conversion Rate Optimization. What percentage increase should you use? It’s up to you, but I like to estimate 10% improvement, because it’s believable and if your user experiences are not already very well optimized, this percentage is usually easy to achieve. But in my experience, if executed well, your first test will do, much, much better.

Keep it simple.

This is a simple ROI calculation. Some may argue it’s too simple, but it makes a compelling argument that’s easy to grasp. The key lesson here is while 10% may not seem monumental, when you see the expected ROI, it often is. And for a low effort with a big reward, it’s a slam-dunk. Use simple math to make your case and you’ll have a better chance of getting your organization on board with conversion rate optimization.

What’s worked for you?

What’s helped you convince your organization or client to start doing conversion rate optimization? Please let me know in the comments!

—
Jamie Steven is the VP Marketing at SEOmoz, and a lover of pumpkin-flavored beverages including lattes and beer—both excellent choices for chilly fall weather.

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September 20, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Location-Based Social Networking for Events & Conferences - An Interview with Foursquare »

Posted by Sam Crocker

Hi there folks!

Today we are going to take a look into Foursquare and, more specifically, we’re going to check out how to use it for events and conferences and uncover some of the answers to the questions that aren’t as easily avilable through the Foursquare site.

Quick Background on Foursquare

So, we’re not going to waste too much time on an introduction to Foursquare, because hopefully you’ve already been focussing on ways to incorporate this into your marketing plan. The implications for any business with a storefront or actual address are fairly straightforward, though the implications for online brands are a bit more difficult to tap into.

It’s Not just for Stalking! (Image via: Geek and Poke)

I had originally prepared a post dedicated to Foursquare and its impact on local and small businesses, however it seems SEO Doctor was one step ahead of me and produced this impressive guide before I was able to get my post out of the drafts folder here on SEOmoz. His post is extremely comprehensive though, so be sure to check it out!

I’ve been hearing loads of people talking about how "they don’t get it" in reference to Foursquare and it’s worth pointing out how many people were having trouble understanding Twitter as well. I would definitely recommend familiarising yourself with Foursquare now - especially if you work with any local companies.

The growth of Foursquare, Gowalla & Facebook Places has been extremely convincing, and the limited number of people making use of the "Specials" available by claiming your local business (for FREE) with Foursquare seems like an obvious missed opportunity - ignore Location-Based social media at your own peril.

Using Foursquare for Conferences and Events

At any rate, as you know, Distilled and SEOmoz have been busy over the last several months preparing for the #mozniar and the PRO seminar in London ( for which I would be remiss not to quickly let you know that tickets are still avaialble). In this preparation we have been looking heavily into ways to spice up the event.

Given my mild obsession with all ways to earn seemingly meaningless points and my new found hobby of Foursquare Roulette (jump off a tube station and randomly try whatever looks entertaining in the area) I proposed we look into Foursquare and what sort of things we might be able to do with it for the conference.

If any of you are as nerdy as I am, then I’m sure you will have noticed how some of the biggest brands as well as some of the largest events in the tech and music industries have been able to get their own Badges you can unlock by checking-in at various locations.

Screen Cap from Tony Felice

The first thing you’ll notice is that these are not small affairs and there are potentially obvious reasons why these clients were potentially able to strike a deal to get a badge. You might also notice - if you’ve looked into this previously - that it can be fairly difficult to find any information about how these deals are struck, and it can be equally difficult to get in touch with the folks at Foursquare about striking up a deal.

Getting to the Source - An Interview with Eric F.

After enough prodding and digging through my own social networks for any potential "in" I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to get in touch with Eric, who happens to be the Director of Client Services - and was incredibly helpful and happy to speak to us.

Rather than be selfish with the responses I thought I would provide some of the answers he provided to my most burning questions about it all. Here are the responses I was able to dig up, I’ll include a brief recap of the implications afterwards:

What would be your top tip(s) for making the most of Foursquare for conferences and Events?

EF: Setting up goals ahead of time is the best way to plan for a conference. You may have a single-day event and encourage people to check-in early, or you may have an event spread out over a few days or weeks and have people check-in early, in the middle, and at the end. We look at foursquare as a flexible platform, depending on event planners’ needs. Some folks have found success with contests or tips to visit different booths. Others use foursquare as a way for attendees to connect and to see who else is at their event.

One recent conference used foursquare to show which events had the most people attendants, and then gave the speakers a chance to connect to their audience via Twitter after the fact.

There is a very robust API available as well that give event organizers the ability to show live check-ins and other interesting data about the event in real time.

In the past we’ve have seen badges from events and conferences (e.g. CES, Bonnaroo, SXSW, etc.) in the past- how does that work? Is that a service that people pay for? Is there generally a threshold about how "big" or "cool" an event is? Or is it more just about getting in touch?

EF: We’re still in the early days of this, and have been testing different approaches around partner and event-related badges. Sometimes, we choose a venue because of a cool use of the platform; other times, it’s to reach a new audience

In the future we hope to roll out a more structured plan for event planners and conferences - but for now we are inspired by the ideas and implementations we have seen from these events.

Is this a market Foursquare has considered? There seem to be loads of conferences and events and it seems like partnerships (with badges and such) could be a real opportunity.

EF: We are concentrating on the best user experience possible. If this comes at events and conferences, we are doing our job right.

What things can/should any event organiser do with Foursquare in the short-term? Obviously there is more to be done for a massive festival or conference, but what about one-off events or smaller time affairs?

EF: We look at our loyalty offers (in the form of special offers and mayor offers) as a big win for anyone with a physical location. These reward people that go somewhere for the first time, or are loyal customers. This also lets merchants track success with redemptions and foot traffic.

We know that business accounts are free, but how do your partnerships work with larger brands? Is there a general price range on these? How much does it cost for a brand to get their own badge? What if they want more than one?

EF: All business partnerships with foursquare are totally free. This includes someone with a single location such as a bar or restaurant, to a national retailer with 10,000 locations. To be 100% clear, we offer the ability to see analytics, run specials, and interact with new and loyal customers totally right now.

Badge programs have either a monthly cost associated with them that is directly tied to promotional consideration and reach, as well as the longevity of the campaign.

Who should large brands try to get in touch with if they want to team up with Foursquare?

EF: We have a dedicated support area for businesses: http://support.foursquare.com/forums/177952-foursquare-for-business

This ensures that the proper person will be able to answer the proper question whether it comes in from a local merchant, large chain, agency representing a brand, event question, or anything else that may arise.

What about smaller brands?

EF: Same as above - funneling requests through one system ensure that someone on the team gets back to people quickly, correctly, and promptly.

Finally, any previews/things in the works for business/marketing uses of Foursquare you’re willing to share?

EF: Knowing where events are happening, or where people are gathered, is a great metric of discovery. We’re all about letting folks know when something is happening, and most importantly where it is happening. We are looking at ways to empower users and businesses by giving them this knowledge at their fingertips.

Making Sense of it All

No surprise that the Foursquare team are keeping some of their cards fairly close to their chests, but there’s definitely some key takeaways from this.

1. You don’t have to be a global brand to get the hook-up. It seems pretty clear that any creative uses of the API are a definite way to grab attention from the folks at Foursquare, and is potentially a clever way to get your own badge.

2. There is no doubt that Foursquare and other location-based social media platforms are growing and now is the time to make sure that if you work with any local businesses: get on the ball, get your venue registered, and go to town. I would not be the least bit surprised if in some fashion or another this sort of data (rankings, tips, check-ins, etc) becomes quite valuable to the team over at Google when it comes to looking at local ranking factors.

3. If you decide to make location-based social networking part of your plan - let people know! There’s no sense building the most incredible API to date to be used at your event, venue, etc. and not letting people know about it.

4. Even if you can’t get your event/conference its own badge there is still plenty you can do to engage Foursquare users.

Examples for Short Conferences

Be sure to set up your venue(s) as locations
Create multiple venues for the same location (e.g. "Conference Room 1" "Bar" "Exhibition Hall" etc)
Rewards for check-ins (forget about Mayor’s - focus on the short term)
Make use of Existing Apps. Check out ScreenScape, LocaModa, 2Know and if you’re in London tell people to try out FourTap
Create a new App
Encourage early check-ins and sharing via Twitter
Splash some cash and get your event a badge

Examples for Longer Conferences

As above
Have incentives for multiple check-ins
Encourage check-ins from multiple venues
Offer a prize for the mayor of the conference

Where exactly we end up along the spectrum of "things you can do" for London PRO for this year is still a work in progress, but you can bet I’ll be championing for meaningless points and our own spin on the thing - and you can be sure we’ll let you know what we come up with.

A very big thank you to Eric F. and the Foursquare team for taking the time to answer our questions!

Please let us know your thoughts below and any successes/hiccups you all have had using location-based social networking in the comments section below.

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September 19, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Optimizing SEO Resources - Whiteboard Friday »

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Hello everybody! My name is Aaron Wheeler and I do customer service here at SEOmoz; if you call us or email us, there’s a 50% chance you’ll end up talking to me. Oh well! Your loss is my gain. =) Anyways, one of my new tasks in the office will be video production so you may end up seeing my gob around the blog every once in a while. I’ll be the main one posting these Whiteboard Fridays in the future as well as some of the other glorious cinema we create to vitalize your ears and eyes. It’ll be fun! If you have any feedback or ideas, I’d love to hear them; you can reach me by email or twitter at my contact page: Aaron Wheeler. Nice to meet you!

This week, our very own Danny Dover discusses some important and scalable ways to optimize your SEO resources. We all know that pickins’ can be slim when it comes to many companies’ budgets for SEO, so why not make the best of what you’ve got? Danny has some ways that you can make the most bang for your (and your boss’s) buck.

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Hello, everybody. My name is Danny Dover. I do SEO here at SEOmoz. Today we have something a little bit special. We’ve bought all new equipment and new microphones. We heard your comments in the blog posts that our sound quality was a little bit "meh." So, we’re trying to make it a lot less "meh." So, please give us your continued feedback in the comments below.

For today’s Whiteboard Friday, we’re going to be talking about optimizing your SEO resources. So, according to my research, this is the most meta SEO Whiteboard Friday we’ve ever done. We have optimizing and then, of course, the O in SEO stands for optimization. So, if there is some kind of time warp or something that goes on, just expect it. It is kind of the things, part of the downside of this job is that sometimes you disrupt the universe. Oh, well.

So, I’ve broken this down into three categories that I recommend.

1. Define Goals

The first one is define goals. Just like self-help books, goals are very important, right? That analogy didn’t work per se. Maybe I need to read more self-help books. That would be a good idea. Define goals, right. I have broken that down into three subcategories.

Find your highest ROI customer. This is a little bit counterintuitive but it makes a lot of sense. I recommend doing this first. If you have an established website and you’re trying to optimize your SEO resources, you’re already going to have some data on who your customers are. Let’s say you are a newspaper website. I’m sorry, first of all. Hard times for you, but good luck. So, if you’re a newspaper website, you’ve got to figure out if it is your politics readers who are going to make you more money or if it is going to be your sports reader that are going to make money. Then based on this information, you get this from your analytics and some Excel stuff, figure out what you can do to target those customers specifically. So, really maximize the money you are already getting. So you have these resources in place. Make sure that you are getting the most out of them. That is kind of the key to optimization.

Identify your budget. They say the creativity is limited by, or creativity is dictated by limitation. The Google homepage is always the example I hear about this. Although, if Google is watching, you’re kind of getting overboard lately. The one where the balls went flying everywhere annoyed the heck out of me. Please don’t do that again. Identify what your budget is. This is going to dictate everything that you are able to do. Are you going to be able to hire on a whole team of content writers? Are you going to be able to get SEO consultants onboard with you? How are you going to do all of your web development stuff? It’s all dictated by budget. So, know what that is going forward. Get it on paper. Make sure you know what this is. Make as elaborate a budget as you can upfront so that you know what you are going to be able to do going forward.

Develop a Content Strategy. this is the one where I see mistakes made the most times, myself included. I mess this up all the time. Develop your content strategy. The key to SEO — and you have heard lots of talking heads like myself talk about this in SEO spaces — is that content is the key for SEO. That’s because when people go to search engines, be it Google, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever it may be, they’re going there to find content, right? That’s the purpose. They want some kind of question answered. The key to SEO is content, building that thing that Google is going to want to index and provide in their search results. You need to figure out how it is going to happen. Who is going to be writing these contents? If it is a blog post, is it going to be Jamie from marketing, is he going to be the one who is going to write it every week? Is it going to be every week? Is it going to be every day? Do you have a signed contract from Jamie saying he’s going to do this? What happens if he is out on vacation or something? How are you going to get the content produced every week? Who’s going to write it? Who’s going to edit it? How is it going to get published? You need to figure out these details early, as quickly as you can. Get them ironed out on paper.

2. Calculate Impact vs. Effort

Calculate impact versus effort. This one is kind of core to optimization. Figure out what are your lowest hanging fruits, this is the first one. I found the best way to do this is using, this is super self-promotional here, using OpenSiteExporer.org, which is a SEOmoz product. It’s free. You don’t even have to sign up to use the basic version. But with OSE, with Open Site Explorer, you go in there, put in your URL or your competitor’s URL if you are really clever. Click on the tab that says top pages, and it will show you all of the top pages by links, so which page has the most links to it. It will show you the status codes. So, if it is like a 404 error, it means you have links going to that page, but you are not getting any SEO value from it. The same thing with a 302 redirect. If it is not a 301 redirect, it is not going to help you from an SEO perspective if it is a 302. These are links that you already have. You’ve already done the effort to make these work, but you aren’t getting any benefit from them. They’re the low hanging fruit. Again, that is OpenSiteExploreer.org.

Meet with stakeholders. I would say it is about three months ago now, we did this at SEOmoz. We brought in all the heads of the departments here and then a couple other important influencers for the company. We put them all in one room. We were like, "Okay, what are everyone’s top priorities?" What do they want to see happen in the year to come at SEOmoz? We wrote our suggestions on sticky notes, put them up on the board. It was not surprising that they varied by department. I am in the marketing department here and mine happened to be marketing goals, whereas the developers wanted some more back end things to happen. The bus dev people wanted more, like, "We should make more money. That’d be a great idea, right?" That’s why they’re the bus dev people. Then we had operations who were doing other things like that as well. We put all of these on a whiteboard, discussed them all, and then voted on them as a team. Based on this, based on how much effort it is going to take from the marketing department, how much benefit are we going to get globally for the entire company as a whole? We found that this exercise provided a lot of value for us. It is actually the roadmap that we are using today.

3. Document Repeatable Processes

Document repeatable processes. This is kind of self-explanatory. In SEO, there are lots of tedious projects you have to do. Let’s say it is link building. You’re going to go do the keyword research, figure out what anchor text you want to target, then you are going to go through and find out what the relative link sources are for that. You’re going to contact the right people and ask them if you have a template probably. Or you’re going to do some kind of, build some content so it can attract the links naturally. That’s the way I like to do it, just as a side note.

With these, whatever your process is, whatever you find works for you and your organization, document the processes. Write down every single step. I do this for two reasons. The first one is so that I know I am not missing a step when I go through this. A lot of times when I have done a process for the umpteenth million time, I skip a step just because I am human, I get bored of it, and I stop paying attention. But if I have a checklist in front of me, I can go through and make sure I don’t do it. The other reason is for scalability. If you can take this process and hand it off to more people to do the same process as you while you are doing it, then it is going to scale, right? You’re going to get more throughputs on this process. I have found this to be extremely successful here and especially when I was doing SEO work with clients in the past. If I push this off to other people who are working for the company who are doing similar things, we can maximize the amount of impact we get with minimal effort from the people involved. So, it’s fantastic.

That’s all the time I’ve got today. I look forward to hearing all your comments below. Thank you. I’ll see you next week. Bye.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow Danny on Twitter! Even more to your benefit, follow SEOmoz! Alternatively, you can always follow me, Aaron.

If you have any tips or advice that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

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September 16, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic & Whitespark) »

Posted by randfish

In the last year, there’s been a plethora of entrants to the field of link building services outside the traditional software basis of reversing competitors’ backlinks (like our Link Intersect, LAA or Open Site Explorer tools) and consulting/direct purchase. In this post, I’ll try to cover some of the interesting major new services, as well as present some long-standing options that some SEOs may not have discovered.

I’ve segmented the services below into unique sections to help differentiate the types of link building they offer. Some are more service-based, others are pure-software and the first section is more visibility-based than direct link acquisition.

Zemanta

One of the unique offerings in the last few years, Zemanta lets publishers submit a feed of content or images to them, which then appear in front of bloggers in the "composition" window (while they write their posts). These are labeled as "related posts" and have multiple benefits:

They can improve branding amongst a blogging audience (as bloggers will see your site/brand name while they write)
They can draw in direct links (if the blogger chooses to link to your work in the post or as a "related post" at the bottom - or through links from image references)
They can attract direct traffic from the bloggers themselves, who are likely to click on links/content that appears to be interesting

You can try Zemanta’s service via a demo on their site

Zemanta has (according to their team) been approved by Google’s search quality folks as a white-hat service (which makes sense since all they’re doing is showing advertising content to writers, who then determine if they want to link or not) and is now included in Wordpress and Blogger.

SEOmoz has been using them for over a year now (we started with a trial and continued on) and we’ve seen good results - we tend to get a half dozen or so links to our content (the blog and YOUmoz) each month which can be seen through their reporting system (which has some upgrades in the works).

*Other than our paid use of the service, SEOmoz does not have any affiliations with Zemanta or its founders.

MyBlogGuest

Founded by Ann Smarty, MyBlogGuest provides a platform for those seeking to write and receive guest posts. The service is relatively simple, but potentially quite powerful. If a reasonable number of quality blogs and sites participate in the marketplace, the opportunities for providing great posts and receiving traffic and links back are tremendous (as are the opportunities for those seeking more content and relationships).

Blogging is an inherently social field and while the links may be a primary driver for many interested in the site, Ann has made it clear that she hopes deeper relationships will emerge from the connections. The site’s layout and signup process are impressive and compelling, though driving action once inside the platform could still use a bit more polish.

The marketplace is currently based on a forum connections system

You can read more about the project in SearchEngineLand’s interview with Ann from February.

I’ll be surprised if some Silicon Valley style startups don’t pop up to copy this model. Hopefully Ann can stay far enough ahead of the game through a network effect to remain competitive. It’s a terrific idea that needs only enough branding and awareness in the space to take off.

*SEOmoz does not have an affiliation with this site, though we have contracted Ann, personally, to do projects for us in the past.

EightFoldLogic’s Linker

Originally known as Enquisite, EightFoldLogic, a software company with offices in Victoria BC and San Francisco has recently launched a marketplace of their own for website owners of all stripes called "Linker." The premise is similar to MyBlogGuest, but the audience is wider and the interface more customized for creating one-to-one, private connections.

Eightfoldlogic's Linker
Linker enables the creation of "criteria" much like personal ads for linking connections

Within a day of signing up in a single category, I had four potential "matches"

Linker’s goal is to connect sites and marketers interested in partnerships or link relationships with one another. Since their service ends at the time of connection, the method of obtaining the link is up to the parties involved. This means plenty of white hat options, but also potential gray hat ones - however, EightFoldLogic’s Richard Zwicky and the audience they’ve traditionally attracted lean white hat, so I expect this won’t be an issue unless the audience changes substantially.

The concept of marketplaces for link acquisition and connecting to site owners interested in links is a compelling one, but the key, as with MyBlogGuest above, will be achieving the critical mass of users necessary to make the service valuable. To that end, Linker’s made their product completely free for the next couple months - you can sign up here.

*SEOmoz provides link data via our API to EightFoldLogic but does not have a financial stake in the company or this product.

Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about a tactic to grow your Google local/maps rankings that involved a similar principle to the automated tool built by Whitespark and Ontolo.

The concept is to find sites that are included in Google Local’s "sources" for maps and local review data that link to or reference multiple sites that rank in the local results. It’s a simple idea, but well executed and incredibly useful for those seeking to optimize their local listings. You can try the Local Citation Finder here - results take just a few minutes to be returned.

Whitespark Local Citation Finder
Enter some data about your site/goals and the citation finder will email you potential sources for listings

As the local results grow in importance and competition, and as the value of having these consistent, multiple listings rises, I suspect this tool will be incredibly popular. I’d love to see further productization around showing more data about the importance/value of particular local listing sites, and some opportunities to help control and manage those listings, but this first version is pretty exciting on its own.

*SEOmoz does not have a financial or product relationship with either WhiteSpark or Ontolo, though we have been talking to the latter about use of our API in other products.

—————

Although there are dozens of other services I’d love to cover, these are some of the most interesting to me, personally. As always, looking forward to your thoughts and recommendations, too!

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September 16, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

LDA correlation 0.17 not 0.32 »

Posted by bhendrickson

LDA is remarkably well correlated to SERPs, but by substantially less than I thought or claimed. Expected correlation (as measured by expected spearman’s correlation coefficient over our dataset) is 0.17 instead of 0.32. I found a mistake with the calculation that produced the 0.32 score.

0.17 is a fine number, but it is awkward having previously claimed it was 0.32.

Some Implications:
Statements I made in the past two weeks along the lines of "LDA is more important (as we measure it, yada yada) than other ways we’ve found to evaluate page content, and even more surprising than any single link metric like the number of linking root domains" are incorrect. A corrected statement would be "LDA is better correlated (yada yada) than other ways to measure page content relevance to a query that we’ve looked at, but less correlated (yada) than several ways to count links."

Topic modeling is still another promising piece of the pie, but the slice is not as large as I thought. Or claimed.

Slightly long winded description of the bug and what evidence there was of it:
I was looking into the discrepancy between Russ Jones’s chart, which showed roughly a linear relationship between SERP ranking and sum LDA scores, and Sean Ferguson’s chart, which showed a huge jump for the mean LDA score but the rest pretty random. Russ Jones had based his chart off our tool. Sean based his chart off the spreadsheet. After looking at it for a little bit, it was pretty clear the source of the discrepancy was that the tool and the spreadsheet are inconsistent.

I tried reproducing a few results of the queries in the spreadsheet using the tool. After about a dozen, it was clear the spreadsheet (compared to the tool) had a consistently higher scores for the first result, and consistently lower scores for the other results. That is technically referred to as the ah shit moment.

I reviewed the code that differs for the web page and the spreadsheet, and found a bug that explains this. When generating scores for the spreadsheet, it caused the topics for the query to be largely replaced with topics for the first result. This made the first result to be scored too highly, and later results to be scored lower.

Excluding the first result from every SERP, the bug actually made the results less correlated in the spreadsheet, but the help getting the first result correct was enough to boost the correlation up a lot.

A Few Related Thoughts:

When I release statistics in the future, I will continue to try to ensure we provide enough data to verify (or in this case show a flaw with) the calculation. Although I found the bug, it was only a matter of time before someone else would try reproducing a few of the queries in the tool and see the discrepancy. So releasing data is a good way to ensure mistakes get discovered.
The actual expected correlation coefficient, 0.17, still is, at least to us at SEOmoz, exciting. But the smaller number is less exciting, and it really really sucks I first reported the expected value for the coefficient as 0.32.
Some have claimed there is something invalid with measuring correlation by reporting the expected value of Spearman’s correlation coefficients for SERPs. They are still wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right. My programming mistake doesn’t invalidate any of the arguments I’ve made about the math behind the methodology.
Mistakes suck. I feel shitty about it. I’m particularly sorry to anyone who got really excited about 0.32.

Here is a corrected spreadsheet and below is a corrected chart. For historical purposes, I’ll leave the incorrect spreadsheet available. I’ll edit the two prior LDA blog posts to include links to this one.

[Update around 7PM: I'd really like this to over, but maybe it is not. Sean pointed out to me the mean for the second result is higher than the first result. I don't have a good explanation for why they would be. Hell, the few I looked at the spreadsheet today the first result is higher in the tool and the spreadsheet. I was rushing to get a correction out there - it may well be I fucked up the correction, and maybe in a way I could have noticed exactly the same way. I'll update this post when I know more, but I think 0.17 really might not be the last word. I may not have it in me to do a mea culpa post for the mea culpa post, but I'll update this post with whatever I learn. Seriously sorry. Just treat all of this as suspect until we know more.]

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September 15, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

What You Need to Know About the #NewTwitter »

Posted by JoannaLord

Well yesterday was a big day on Twitter, wasn’t it? I don’t know about you but I was glued to the live stream of the not-so top secret Twitter press conference at exactly 3:30 pm and watched closely for an hour and a half while @Ev and @Biz told us all about the new "bigger and better" Twitter.com. The founders outlined many of the recent achievements they have seen with the growth of their community and announced the release of a brand new interface for Twitter.com, which will be rolling out to all users over the new few weeks (it’s important to note that currently only 1% of users have access to the redesign, that decision was not so well received.)

The new interface has a renewed focus on the user experience with in stream multi-media expansions, more search capabilities, and an all around sexier more fluid feeling. I went crazy yesterday playing with the new interface and wanted to share way too many screenshots and my thoughts on the new layout. I am excited to hear what you guys think all of these changes mean, so let’s do this, shall we? What are the big changes to our beloved Twitter.com?

1. Redirect users back to THEIR WEBSITE – Whoa!

I have to admit I got a little fiesty yesterday when I saw my stream fill up with tweets that said things like "that is it?!" and "its just a new interface, what’s the big deal?!" Twitter has over 160 million users, but as we all know many of those users use second party Twitter clients rather than the web interface itself. Ev noted yesterday at the conference that Twitter mobile users are up 250% year over year, which was the motivation for them to release their own mobile apps earlier this year. While this mobile surge has meant huge growth for the community it hasn’t done as much for their on-site value. The announcement yesterday was important because it was their first real attempt to redirect those millions of users to a more compelling on-site experience. Whatever the long term goal is for Twitter.com the website, yesterday’s announcement was a huge step toward a more united community of users. This.is.a.big.deal.folks.

New Twitter Platform

(The new Twitter.com… ohhh pretty!)

2. A whole lot more space for …. uhmmmm advertisements?

So now that we have refocused our attention and time back to Twitter.com what will they do with it? Well sell us things obviously. As you can see below there sure is a lot more space for Twitter to fill. You will notice the "Sponsored Tweets" and the "Who to Follow" elements are more prominent. In addition to that you will see some open areas (that look a lot like traditional ad space units) laced throughout the platform. In general I think its pretty clear that they used this UI redesign to give themselves more options for the up and coming advertising platform we keep hearing about.

Twitter Ad Space

(Notice all that space they get to play with!)

3. Focus on other tweets, searches…you know uhmmm NOT your tweet

During the press conference Ev mentioned specifically that Twitter is a unique community of users in that not everyone actually tweets. He noted plenty of people use it just to listen or research…very "search enginey" if you ask me (yes I just made that word up). The new design certainly focuses less on my actual tweet and more on the experience I am having as a Twitter user. You will see the "search box" was moved to top right, and has much more functionality than previously. I can see tweets with my searched word(s), "tweets with links" & that word, "tweets near me" with that word, and see profiles or people that include that searched word. This is a far better experience all around if you ask me, again compelling users to stay on Twitter.com rather than leave and search elsewhere. Smart move people, smart move.

New Search Experience

(New search experience…man I love Pumpkin Spice lattes from Starbucks)

4. Media, media, media oh my!

This is probably the change you are hearing most about. The new platform has the ability to view pictures and video in stream, by expanding from the left column (your tweet stream) to the right column (now used more as an expanded view). In addition to seeing whatever multi media you clicked on you will also see people mentioned in the tweet you expanded, a brief history of that user’s tweets, and the latest tweet that tweet may have been in response too. Uhmmm sound confusing? Basically the expanded view of any tweet is now much more of a comprehensive story of that tweet. No longer on the web client will you be clicking from profile to profile to read a full conversation and get context. This new layout has put the story of a tweet together for you in one place. It’s smooth, trust me…you will like it!

Image in Twitter

(The new platform when you expand an image… Hi Matt!)

Video in Twitter

(The new platform with expanded video…ohhh puppy!)

5. All sorts of other little things

You are not losing your backgrounds (phew!). Atleast right now we still have them. Also you might want to revisit your right column profile color–it’s bigger now.
Direct messages are up in your navigation (quite seperate from the other functionality actually) and are much more streamlined in my opinion. You now click in and see the number of DM exchanges, and can expand to see them all clearly. I was happy to see this. However you no longer see a "number" which was the only way us web client users knew if we had a new DM (unless we got an email notification) so be careful not to miss those new DMs!
The new platform still does not support multiple users, sorry folks!
Retweets. I still don’t really like them, so don’t hate me when I say that I am stoked they made the ability to shut off retweets from someone so much easier! It’s in there next to the option to get a user’s tweets on your cell. Both options are right there and a simple click to change. Easy smeasy for sure.
The new platform makes replying to multiple people challenging. No longer can you hit reply and aggregate user handles in one tweet, each "reply" click pulls up an individual tweet box. Ugh, yuck. I hope they change this soon.

(When you hit reply a box pops-up…still a bit buggy right now)

"Trends" have some serious face time. I think we will find a lot more focus as marketers on getting our topics on the "trend" list (organically or not maybe eventually purchased) as I can imagine this will be much like scoring first page Digg time…similar atleast. You can see they are now top right, whoa in your face!
They are calling this a "preview" on the interface, and when you get it you will have a notification box where you must manually click into it. You can also (atleast right now, I guess its going away in a few weeks) chose to "leave the preview" and return to your old interface. I don’t think you will want to, but to each their own ;)

That about sums up the big changes I am seeing. As for what it all means? I think this is a renewed focus on Twitter.com - the site not Twitter - the company. Both Evan and Biz alluded to lots of changes coming down the pipeline, and there is a clear energy of excitement in the stream. I don’t know about you but I am certainly going to playing around more on the web interface both as a user and a marketer. I think we will have some interesting opportunities coming our way…uhmmm both as users and as marketers ;)

Looking for other insights?
Checked out @ev’s stream from yesterday, he gave a play for play
Read the official blog post about it
Watch a video and learn more about it from Twitter

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September 15, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Build Your Own Weighted Sort (GA Style) »

Posted by Dr. Pete

If you’re a Google Analytics fan, you probably already know that Google released a new and incredibly useful featured called Weighted Sort. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a quick example – let’s say you want to know which of your referring sites have the highest bounce rate. You could pull up your referrers, sort by bounce rate, and get something like this:

Standard Google Analytics Sort

Fascinating, right? I now know that I lost 7 visitors due to 5 sites. If I could just get that bounce rate down to 60%, I’d have 3 more visitors. Wow. What did you really want to know, intuitively? Probably something more like this:

Google Analytics Weighted Sort

That’s better – it’s not the absolute highest bounce rate you wanted to know about, but the most important high bounce rate referrers. In a nutshell, that’s the question weighted sort tries to answer.

How It Works

So, how does weighted sort work, exactly? Avinash Kaushik wrote a fascinating and very transparent post on the method behind Google’s weighted sort algorithm. I encourage you to read his post and I don’t want to copy it, but I’ll try to do a very basic review here.

Google uses something called the "Estimated True Value" (ETV). ETV essentially says this – if the count column of the sort (in this case, Visits) is very low, assume that the column of interest (Bounce Rate) is roughly the average for the data in question. In other words, if a row has 1 visit and the average bounce rate is 75%, then set the ETV of bounce rate for that row to 75%. Since 1 visit isn’t enough, statistically speaking, to make any really conclusions, we’ll essentially ignore it.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you have a very high visit value, assume the bounce rate is accurate as is. Simple enough, right? What about values in the middle? Well, Google sets the ETV somewhere in between the average and the row’s bounce rate. Exactly how much of each they use is the tricky part.

The Equation

This is where Avinash’s post ends and mine really begins. I should warn you – it’s not going to get Ben-complicated, but there is going to be some math. After a bout of 4am insomnia, I pieced together a simplified weighted sort equation. I’m going to present it first, explain it, and then provide an Excel spreadsheet with some real-life examples.

Let’s assume we’ve got a data set exactly like above – visit counts and bounce rates for a set of referring sites. We’re going to need 4 sets of variables:

V = Visits for Row X
B = Bounce Rate for Row X
MV = Max Visits for the data set
AB = Average (mean) Bounce Rate for the data set

For any given row, the ETV of Bounce Rate – ETV(B) – can be represented by the following equation:

ETV(B) = (V / MV * B) + ((1 - (V / MV)) * AB)

Crystal clear, right? It’s not really as bad as it looks. Let’s take an example – say we have the following data (same 4 variables as above):

V = 100
B = 80%
MV = 500
AB = 60%

The ETV(B) will consist of two components:

V / MV * B = 100 / 500 * 0.80 = 0.20 * 0.80 = 0.16
1 - (V / MV) * AB = 1 - (100 / 500) * 0.60 = 0.80 * 0.60 = 0.48
ETV(B) = 0.16 + 0.48 = 0.64

Pay attention to the parts in bold – since 100 visits is 20% of the max visits for this data set, this row gets 20% of its bounce rate from the actual value and the rest (80%) from the average value for the data set. So, essentially, how much we use the "real" bounce rate for the row is a function of the proportion of that row’s visit value to the visit value of the top referrer.

Build Your Own

Want to try it yourself? You can download my Excel spreadsheet and see the formula at work across a larger data set of actual referring visits from my own site. Although this replicates a function you already have in Google Analytics, it can be used for all sorts of applications that you don’t have in GA, including PPC metrics (Visits by Quality Score, for example).

There are actually four sheets in the Excel workbook:

Basic ETV formula
Google’s ETV sort
Weighted ETV formula
Log-based ETV formula

Those last two require a bit of explaining. In my very simple model (1), I calculate the average bounce rate by just taking an average across all the rows (for this data set = 70.6%). The thing is, that’s not how Google calculates the average bounce rate. They actually weight it by the number of visits, which makes perfect sense. So, in Google Analytics, my bounce rate for this data set is 74.6%, which is what (3) shows. If you compare (2) to (3), you’ll see that my weighted formula only differs in the Top 10 by rows #8 and #9 being swapped.

My approach is a pretty good approximation for this data set, but it’s still just an approximation. If you have a very large range of visit values (1 to 100,000), you might find that rows with smaller but still interesting counts (1,000+) get unfairly ignored. Sheet (4) is a more complex formula that uses the Log (base 2) of visits instead of the raw visit value. This has the effect of de-emphasizing the visit count in favor of the "real" bounce rate for that row.

If you’re still with me at this point, I hope you’ll play around with the spreadsheet. If you find issues with your own data sets or discover some better/cooler way of doing it, please share it in the comments.

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September 14, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Link Building 101 - The Almost Complete Link Guide »

Posted by scott.mclay

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A lot has changed since I got into link building a few years ago - link exchange is dead, ad banners are no longer all about gaining referral traffic, and buying links is more dangerous than ever before. Because of the changes mentioned and a whole load of others the majority of link builders don’t like to give away their secrets to sourcing links, even though it’s all pretty much the same at most agencies.

Most of the advice I will be giving throughout this post is most likely available from a large number of sources including SEOmoz but I felt it would be great to bring everything together under one simple guide.

Creating your link building strategy
Before building any links to a website it is important to ask yourself a few questions like:

What kind of links do you need?
Do you need nofollow and branded links?
Do you have a wide enough range of anchor text and landing pages?

Sadly every strategy is different and people can’t answer these questions for you but hopefully you can use the following information to help answer the questions.

Link Placement
In recent times Google has started placing value in link placement, in-content links passing the most value and footer links passing the least, although a good link profile should make good use of every link type as going out and sourcing only in-content links would be a very big sign of an unnatural link profile.

Nofollow & Dofollow
A lot of people go out and source dofollow links, but in doing this they do more harm to their link profile. Every website should have a good balance of nofollow links - there have been cases where sites with a very low number of nofollow links have not ranked as highly as others who keep a good balance.

Branded Links
I believe Domain Authority and Domain Trust make up a fairly large chunk of the ranking algorithm. Even though there are loads of factors in measuring these attributes, one good sign of both is having a good number of brand based anchor text pointing to your website. Some people make the mistake of only building branded terms to the homepage, when in fact there is more value in building links using these terms to landing pages throughout your website.

Anchor Text & Landing Page Distribution
When working on a link building campaign, it is important to work on a wide range of landing pages, using a variety of anchor text for each. Working on a small keyword / landing page set can upset the balance of a website and can have a very negative impact long term.

Content Relevancy
Since the Google May Day update this year, relevancy seems to play a larger role in the ranking factors. Even though the days of keyword stuffing are over, there is still a need to reference your keywords within your content, header tags, URI structure and title tags. Content may not be king but it is one of the keys to a successful link building campaign.

Sourcing Links
Once you have your link building strategy done and dusted the next step is to find suitable websites to source links from. There are many techniques that can be used for this job, some of which rely on tools and others that use manual search queries.

Link Building Tools
If you plan to use link building tools then chances are you will be looking at links going to competitors’ websites. This is one of the best ways to start a link building campaign and can lead to positive results, some of the best tools for this job are:

Open Site Explorer (Free / SEOmoz Pro Members)
- OSE
- How to Use OSE
Competitive Link Research Tool (SEOmoz Pro Members only)
- Competitive Link Research Tool
Majestic SEO (Paid)
- Majestic SEO Website
Yahoo Site Explorer + SEO Quake Plugin (Free)
- Yahoo Site Explorer
- How to use SEO Quake

Manual Search Queries
It is said that it’s not the links your competitors have that will give you the edge but the links the competitors don’t have. To find these you will need to find link opportunities using manual search queries - the best way to do this is by using advanced search operators.

Advanced search operators are not as complicated as they sound but if used correctly they can provide a very nice set of search results. An introduction to advanced search operators can be found here and a short introduction can also be found on my personal blog under the post finding the links that matter.

One search string I would recommend when looking for suitable blogs for most niches is:

[search term] -site:Wikipedia.org -site:blogspot.com -site:telegraph.co.uk -site:wordpress.com -site:about.com -site:nationalgeographic.com -site:guardian.co.uk -"directory" -"add link" -"advertising"

Depending on your niche other domains can also be stripped from the results.

Directory Submissions
Directory submission is the most boring and repetitive job, but sadly it is an important task in any link building campaign. These links make up the numbers when it comes to branded links. Submit to the right directories and they will improve your overall domain authority.

Blog and Forum Commenting
Blog and forum commenting for links is seen as spam due to many people taking advantage of unprotected blogs and forums. If blog and forum commenting is part of your outlined strategy then some effort should be put into them.

The best way to act on this kind of link building is by using Google’s blog search to find the most recent articles published within your niche then make a genuine comment based on the content of the article, using the Name field for branded anchor text. This type of link building is best for increasing the number of nofollow links to your website.

Guest Blogging Communities
Guest blogging is a great place to find blogs within your niche, but instead of offering to do a guest post why not offer to write a few pages (I say pages as they are linked to via the top navigation) of content for them? After all these people want content and being able to source multiple pages not only saves time but can also lead to Google seeing the links as trustworthy, just remember to link out to authority sites within your niche as well.

Widgets & Theme Designs
There has been a lot of talk about creating widgets to increase the number of natural user generated links, which does work, but the widget you create does have to be unique and worth having so there isn’t a gap for this in every niche.

Another way to increase the number of user generated links is by creating a WordPress theme, a lot of people have said there is low value in this but if the theme is good enough it can generate 40k+ links (from previous experience). If you wish to go down this route the best way to market it is via your monthly newsletters, just put in a small section about it and wait for results, but remember to also submit it to theme hubs around the web for additional exposure.

Link to Us Pages
Link to us pages are not only great for increasing the number of user generated links but great for masking other link building activities. I would suggest having a link to us page displaying all the branded terms used within your campaign and have different types of links for each (Banner Ad, Contextual Ad, Text Link).

Competitions
If you client is running competitions contact bloggers in your niche and ask politely if they would blog about it. Although getting targeted anchor text through this tactic is harder it can help build the number of generic keywords linking to your domain.

Contacting Webmasters
Making contact with webmasters is one of the most difficult jobs - just about every email sent out needs to be personalised and in some cases contact is needed via social media before an email has been sent.

When sending an email to a webmaster, remember they are a real person just like you, so ask yourself a few simple questions before drafting:

If you were the webmaster what would persuade you to link out?
Would you rather a relationship was formed before receiving a link request?
Should the email be from an SEO’s point of view or would it be better keeping it simple and to the point?

Tracking Progress
Tracking the progress of your link building campaign is something that needs to be done. This can be done in a variety of ways but the best solutions I have found is using Raven Tools for overall tracking of performance and using an Excel document to keep a list of links built containing metrics such as Page Rank, mozRank and Domain Authority.

Having a list of metrics for each link enables you to display a variety of information relating to your link building campaign which helps when generating reports for your clients.

Conclusion
Although link building is a tough task in itself if you plan your strategy properly, build the correct links and track the progress of your strategy the job will become easier over time and you will begin to see what works and what doesn’t for your client.

Just remember every link building campaign is different, even if you deal with clients within the same niche as each website has a different infrastructure and domain history.

If you enjoyed this post then why not visit my Blog or follow me on Twitter.

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September 14, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? »

Posted by Suzzicks

Ok, in the mobile world, it is important to understand that Google sometimes lies (Uhhh! Say it ain’t so!) Actually, all of the major search engines do it with mobile results - It is called ‘transcoding.’ In some cases, the search engines will want to rank a particular page in mobile results, but they know they shouldn’t because they can tell that it will be a bad mobile user experience. (Usually because the file size is too big, or the page has lots of mobile-unfriendly code like Flash or loads of JavaScript).

When this happens, the search engine will show the full search engine listing for the mobile-unfriendly page (like normal), but when you click on it, they will automatically take you to a temporary url that represents a ‘transcoded’ version of the page you requested, (rather than delivering you to the actual page listed in the search results). This temporary transcoded page actually lives on a subdomain hosted by the search engine, and shows a scraped version of the page you requested. The scrape usually just shows the text and small images of the page, but omits anything that might cause problems for a mobile browser; sometimes this can include background images, big images, animations, videos, iFrames, and heavy/complex code.

You Might Want Transcoding, but Probably Not

If you have totally ignored the mobile web, transcoding can be a good thing, because it allows you to rank in mobile results when you otherwise might be omitted. (Ranking with transcoding is better than not ranking at all). Unfortunately, none of the search engines do a stellar job with their transcoding. In Google, pages that are transcoded usually closely resemble the ‘text-only’ version of the page that Google keeps in its cache. In some cases though, the transcoding can really mess up a page, missing core navigation, breaking long pages into multiple pages at odd places, or cutting out important sections.

Remember that the search engine use of transcoded pages differs from phone to phone, so just because pages are not being automatically transcoded from search results on your phone does not mean that they are never being transcoded by the mobile search engines. The less sophisticated a mobile browser is, the more likely the search engine is to transcode a page; based on my experience, this is happening mostly on BlackBerry’s and WindowsMobile devices. To see what a page looks like when Google transcodes it, there are two options:

1.) You can perform a search on a mobile phone, then click the ‘options’ button to the right of one of your results in the SERP, and then select ‘Mobile formatted.’ (Illustrated below)

2.) You can also put your url into Google’s tool, here: http://www.google.com/gwt/n? from your computer or your mobile phone.

The image below shows what Realtor.com looks like when it is transcoded by Google, and it is obviously not a great experience. You can see, in this instance, that two header images are missing, including the logo. It also turns the JavaScript navigation into text links that are a bit squished together, and hard to understand (Find a Home Home Finance Home & Garden). Last, since the transcoding software can’t render JavaScript, it has been served an error message, telling it to turn on JavaScript.

Preventing Transcoding

If you are pretty confident in your mobile site rendering, you can include the ‘no-transform’ cache control in the headers of your template, and that will usually prevent your pages from being transcoded by the search engines, but it is not 100%. The good news is that with faster network connections and better mobile browsers, transcoding by the search engines is becoming much less common. The important take-away here, is to at least test to see what your pages look like when they are being transcoded (even if you have a no-transform cache control in place). In many cases, minor on-page code tweaks can make the transcoded experience much more user-friendly and palatable, improving your ability to reach the widest range of mobile customers, regardless of the phone they are searching from.

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September 14, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

SEO Strategy: Predicting Yearly Site Traffic »

Posted by Kate Morris

As a consultant, I work with many In-House SEO teams with strategy and other issues that arise throughout the course of the year. One trend we are seeing is that these In-House teams are having a hard time coming up with accurate traffic-centered goals. Traffic is the base for many metrics measurements, so being able to semi-accurately predict that number in the coming year is important for every business.

I can hear you all now, "Well there is the Google Keyword Tool … use that." Typically, that is my answer too, but there have been major questions about the accuracy of Google’s keyword tools and others available to webmasters, marketers, and search engine optimization teams.

(If you will comment with your favorite keyword tool other than those I mention, I’ll happily test and add it here!)

The Google Keyword Tools (yes, plural)

There was a shift recently with the Google Keyword Tool. The Legacy/API version is showing different numbers than the newest Beta interface. David Whitehouse and Richard Baxter both noticed this shift as well and did a few tests on accuracy. The jury is still out as to which version is more accurate, the legacy or the new keyword tool. But I believe like Mr. Whitehouse that the newer tool is the updated one, but that does not make it more accurate.

To be clear, when I speak of the Legacy, API, and Beta tools, I do mean different versions of the Google Keyword Tool. First, from what I can see using the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool, the Google API pulls from the Legacy tool, so they are one and the same. The Legacy tool is the prior interface for the current Beta version of the Keyword Tool. We had previously assumed that these pulled the same numbers, but my research and that of others proves otherwise.

But wait! *infomercial voice* There is more!

There is also the Search-based Keyword Tool that aids AdWords advertiser’s in choosing relevant keywords based on search behavior and a specified website. This tool is explained by Google here and gives more in depth information on account organization and cost.

But even this tool is not on par with the other two when it comes to impressions. A random query in the Search-based tool returned a suggestion for the keyword "maragogi." The Search-Based tool says there should be 12,000 monthly searches. The Legacy tool returns 110 Local Exact match searches, 33,100 Global Exact match, and 201,000 Global Broad match. The new tool returns information only for a global setting (all countries, all languages). That returns 74,000 searches broad and phrase match, and 12,100 for exact match. It seems like the Search-based tool is more like the exact global match in this one instance. But what is a business supposed to do with all of these numbers?!?!?

(hint: always use exact match)

Back to Strategy

If these tools are possibly inaccurate, how do our clients go about setting their yearly strategy goals?

Put simply, in search, you never want to rely on one set of results or one ranking report. Data over time and from many sources is best. But with the lack of tools out there and Google bringing in at least 65% of traffic organically for most sites, how do you get the best numbers?

Impressions

First, you need to start out by figuring out how many impressions a keyword or set of keywords can bring in on average for a specific month. If you are in a cyclical industry, this will have to be done per month of the calendar year.

1. Pull from both Google Tools and other Keyword Tools

Below is a look at some information I pulled using the tools mentioned for the key phrase "curtain fabric."

The idea here is that if you take into account all of the numbers out there, you might see a trend that you can use for estimating future traffic. If there is no trend, then a median of the numbers can be used as your metric. A few other tools that you might look into include Word Tracker and Keyword Spy. You can see that the numbers are all over the place, but looking at these figures, I’d guess that the keyword might bring in around 6,500 impressions a month in the UK.

The downside is that WordTracker and KeywordSpy don’t allow you to look at exact match information versus broad match. When performing keyword research, you always want to look at the local (target to your country) exact match information. Too many people pull keyword information use broad match and get inflated numbers for all phrases related to that key phrase.

2. Run a PPC campaign if possible.

The absolute best way to get accurate numbers about traffic over time is to run a PPC campaign. I pulled some numbers from a few campaigns (for our client’s sake we have masked a number of the actual key phrases) in attempts to see if the new keyword tool is accurate to actual trafffic in August. The keywords pulled were all exact match in the campaign and the information pulled from the keyword tool was Local Exact and set to the country that the campaign was targeting.

As you can see, some of these are higher and some lower. What I found that there really is no definitive answer of if the Google Keyword Tool is accurate. Take a look at the results for the example I used before, curtain fabric. The campaign saw 11,389 impressions, much higher than the new keyword tool, and lower than some other keyword tools. This is why a well run PPC campaign is important if you want to get a more accurate look at impression numbers.

Please note that I didn’t get a chance to ensure that these accounts were all showing at all times during the month, but they were all accurately geo-targeted and all showed on the top of the first page on average.

Finding Traffic Based on Rank

After getting a good idea of the number of impressions, you then need to take into account where you are showing for that keyword on average organically (aka your rank). While we cannot know specific click through numbers for every search done on the web, there have been some studies done on how much of those impressions the top organic result gets, the second and so on. The one I used the most often is from Chitika. Using the percent of the traffic below and the impression numbers, you should be able to get a good idea of the visitors you can expect per month organically for a specific key phrase.

So using the "curtain fabric" example, assuming that the site I am working on has maintained an average ranking over the last few months of #3 organically, I could expect about 1300 visits from Google for the keyword in a month (11.42% of 11,389 impressions).

Past Metrics

Once you get everything figured out, keep in mind that your past metrics are another good way of seeing how close you are to getting the traffic about right. Assuming that no major changes have occurred (like lack of metrics data in the last year), a look back is the most accurate way to understand traffic flow and trending on your site. Pull the unique visitors for every month of the last year and do some analysis on percent increase month over month. This can be done on any level in most analytics programs - overall traffic trends all the way down to the keyword level.

A look at overall traffic per month in Google Analytics for organic searches from Google:

A look at traffic for a specific keyword over the last year per month from Google organic:

Educated Guesses

In the end though, making predictions are just that, educated guesses. Pulling data from all available sources and using your own historical data can assist in making an educated prediction for the next year. Keep in mind though that things never stay the same. Google Instant just proved that with one of the biggest changes we have seen in a while.

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September 12, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Exportable PDF Reports Now in the Web App »

Posted by randfish

Since the launch of our beta web app, the #1 feature request from folks writing in to us has been the inclusion of exportable, PDF reports. Today, I heard from our engineering and product teams that these are complete!

You’ll find CSV and PDF exports on most of the reports in the web app from here forward

The new PDF reports include:

Rankings Overview
Rankings History
Crawl Diagnostic Issue Detail (the Overview tab is still in progress)
On-Page Overview
On-Page Report Card

Here’s a sample view of a few reports from accounts I’ve created:

On-Page Report Card PDF

On-page report card in PDF form

Rankings Report Card PDF

Weekly rankings report in PDF form

In addition to PDF, since launch, the web app has offered CSV export for nearly all the sections included.

While we’re excited to make this available, we know we still have a lot of work to do on the web app - a few crawls are still giving us trouble, we’re refining some of the errors, warnings, notices and recommendations it issues and there’s plenty of big features that are on their way. A big thanks to everyone who’s trying out the web app today - if you have requests or issues for us, please do use the feedback tab on the side of every page (these go direct to product & engineering).

If you’re curious about upcoming features, you can see more in this blog post.

p.s. One of the other features that’s been heavily requested is white labeling. That’s probably a few more months away, but we definitely appreciate (and are flattered by) the desire to add your own logos/branding to the reports.

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September 11, 2010 | Posted in News, SEO | Read more »

Five Ways To Use Your Social Profiles For SEO - Whiteboard Friday »

Video Transcription

Follow SEOmoz on Twitter! You should also follow me, Aaron!

How to Turn Google Analytics Into Your Own Rank Tracker Using Custom Variables »

Some History

Why Custom Variables?

The How

Step One - Extract cd= Value from Referrer String

Step 2 - Call cd= Value in our Google Analytics snippet

Step 3 - Create an IF Statement so the CustomVar isn’t Called Every Time

The Most Important Part - Analyzing Our Data

Rankings by City, Region, Country

Historical, Definite, Data

Bounce Rate/eCommerce Data/etc. by Rank

Creating Custom Reports and Advanced Segments

The Downsides

Go Analyze

How to Turn Google Analytics Into Your Own Rank Tracker using Custom Variables »

Some History

Why Custom Variables?

The How

Step One - Extract cd= Value from Referrer String

Step 2 - Call cd= Value in our Google Analytics snippet

Step 3 - Create an IF Statement so the CustomVar isn’t Called Every Time

The Most Important Part - Analyzing Our Data

Rankings by City, Region, Country

Historical, Definite, Data

Bounce Rate/eCommerce Data/etc. by Rank

Creating Custom Reports and Advanced Segments

The Downsides

Go Analyze

So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 2: Analysis Redefined »

The Danger of Overdoing SEO »

Replace Yahoo Linkdomain with Google Custom Search Engine »

Searching Content of Backlinks

Setup of Custom Search Engine

Tips

Example Queries

Give it a Try & Search SEOmoz’s Backlinks

Need More Queries?

Technorati Tags

Video SEO Basics - Whiteboard Friday »

Video Transcription

Follow Danny on Twitter! Even more to your benefit, follow SEOmoz! Alternatively, you can always follow me, Aaron.

So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 1: Asking the Right Questions »

Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update »

880,000 Search Visits Analyzed

Data from 10,000 More Searches

Google Search Traffic for SEOmoz & Open Site Explorer

Other Sources Worth Reading on the Topic

How to Convince your Boss that CRO is a Win »

Make the Case for CRO using Simple Math

Keep it simple.

What’s worked for you?

Location-Based Social Networking for Events & Conferences - An Interview with Foursquare »

Quick Background on Foursquare

Using Foursquare for Conferences and Events

Getting to the Source - An Interview with Eric F.

Making Sense of it All

Optimizing SEO Resources - Whiteboard Friday »

Video Transcription

4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic & Whitespark) »

Zemanta

MyBlogGuest

EightFoldLogic’s Linker

Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder

LDA correlation 0.17 not 0.32 »

What You Need to Know About the #NewTwitter »

Build Your Own Weighted Sort (GA Style) »

How It Works

The Equation

Build Your Own

Link Building 101 - The Almost Complete Link Guide »

What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? »

You Might Want Transcoding, but Probably Not

Preventing Transcoding

SEO Strategy: Predicting Yearly Site Traffic »

The Google Keyword Tools (yes, plural)

Back to Strategy

Impressions